


five times milton escaped from hell (and one time he didn’t)

by Dien



Category: Drive Angry (2011)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/M, Frenemies, Hatesex, M/M, Prostitution, bonding over cars and murder, smarm as foreplay, violence as foreplay, your life choices milton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:14:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26328460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: this movie is so deeply stupid and gloriously bad and i can't believe i wrote this much about it
Relationships: John Milton/The Accountant
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	1. the wilderness

**Author's Note:**

> this movie is so deeply stupid and gloriously bad and i can't believe i wrote this much about it

A boiling sun beats down on the flats of the Arizona desert and there is no shade to be seen for miles. The car he has stolen (a '57 T-Bird, supercharged with the McCullough-Paxton blower) doesn't have AC. That's alright. He has the top down and the speedometer hasn't dropped below eighty for the last thirty miles. His jacket's off, and the blistering sun tingles on his bared arms. It’s a hundred and ten degrees out.

Compared to Hell, it's a nice day.

The roads are nearly empty. He passes RVs on occasion, big lumbering motherfuckers taking up the road, but he never eases up on the gas. He swerves around them in a smooth glide. The highway goes forever, arrow-straight before him across the empty and desolate land. It feels like he has forever, too.

He doesn't, of course.

That's what makes this so sweet. It'll end. But until then. Until. He blasts Zeppelin and CCR. He chases mile markers. He thinks about nothing at all.

The last time... the last time, he had a mission. A reason. A lodestar drive, down in his gut. He remembers very little of it _other_ than the mission-- snatches, sensations here and there, like how fucking _good_ it had felt to plant his boot in the face of Piper's asshole boyfriend. How soft his granddaughter's forehead had been. The bitter, faintly yeasty taste of an ice-cold beer. Pain, a hell of a lot of it. But all that had just been asterisks to the _purpose._

This time, it's about freedom.

He gets a good run of it. He can't complain. (Not that he _won’t_.) But he gets a good six, seven hours with the Thunderbird, before the gas tank runs dry and he has to stop. He rides her all the way past the red line, until she's choking, sputtering, and then he coasts to a stop in a “Valero” that feels shiny-new and corporate and out-of-place here, just as he is. He matches the desert, maybe, because on the featureless road he can pretend it's still 1998, not 2018; but walking into this arctic-air-conditioned gas station that has a yet-to-get-grungy tiled pattern on the floor, that has chrome-shiny tinted windows and a freshly-installed Slushee machine and “e-cigarettes” for sale (the hell?) and “USB-chargeable power packs” (whatever the hell _they_ are?) and a kid behind the counter who _surely_ is not old enough to shave, let alone legally sell the cigarettes behind him--

That part, it makes him feel out of place. He thinks of Piper. Piper sneering at him, What, you mean a _cell phone?_ He thinks about Piper. He hopes she's well.

Webster will have done right by her, he knows. He knows that. Webster's a good man.

He does not think about his granddaughter at all. He does not. He steers his mind from that place, and stares at the racks full of orange chips and neon candies and beef jerky.

“Milton,” pipes the voice, smooth and urbane and polite, behind him, and he wheels, but too slow. Because the hand is around his windpipe already, as strong as iron, as strong as the roots of mountains, lifting him like a toy and he's face to face with Hell's best little fetch dog.

He can't say “Hi, fuck you too,” because his airway's cut off, but the Accountant hasn't done shit about either his arms or his legs, so he kicks the son-of-a-bitch* in the groin** as hard as he can with the full weight of his boot behind it.

(*he wonders distantly if the Accountant is in fact a son-of-a-bitch, if he's the son of anything at all, if he had a mother, a father, or if he was up in Heaven once, long ago, with wings and a harp.... yeah, no)

(**he does note, also distantly, that it seems like the Accountant actually has something there to kick. He'd kinda figured it might be a Ken doll thing, but no--)

The Accountant grunts, but doesn't let go. Those eyes never leave his own: pale blue like lake ice; calm; crinkled a little at the corners with fine-etched crows' feet, or amusement, or both. The scar is still there beneath his left eye-- scar's not even the right word, because it's stitched, but it’s not healed. There’s red, ugly, ground chuck visible beneath the split flesh. Milton wonders at that too. It's been years. Hasn't it?

“ _Milton,”_ the bastard says, chidingly, his smile only fractionally strained from the nutshot. “Really?”

He gropes backwards, fumbling in the shelves behind him, and finds the neck of a bottle. Glass. Good enough. He hooks it with two fingers and swings it around and shatters it across the bastard's face. He turns his wrist at the end, so he's stabbing instead of smashing, driving the broken glass in against the stitched wound on the other man's face.

(He's _not_ a man, though. The thing that _looks_ like a man. The Accountant.)

This time, he hits a nerve. The Accountant doesn't scream, but he does make a _noise,_ a thin, inhuman _keen_ , and the iron hand around Milton’s neck loosens. He wrenches free as the lean figure before him staggers back, curled to protect his face, one hand flying to the wound. Liquid drips from between the Accountant's long fingers, disturbingly red, whore-red, Ford-Mustang-red. Milton doesn't stop to appreciate the view.

He cracks the bottle's busted end down on the top of the Accountant's skull, on that Wall Street haircut, and as the Accountant's head goes downward from the impact he meets it with his rising knee, right to the nose.

Nothing within reach makes a better weapon than the bottle. He settles for an elbow spike, a lot of power behind it, dead center into where the Accountant's spine should be beneath his suit, because the guy's bent over from the blows and it’s a good target. The suited figure goes down, staggers-stumbles-falls to the oh-so-clean-and-new tiled floor.

“I'm not gonna make this easy for you, dickhead,” Milton pants, and bodyslams his hunter with his entire weight, leading with his elbow, again, right to the spine, as hard as he can.

If this were someone human, Milton would be feeling pretty good about the outcome right now. Nobody fights too well with the air knocked out of them, not the toughest motherfucker on the block, not anyone. Get two hundred pounds landing on you like this, and it doesn't matter if you're MMA, SWAT, black belt wizard or the scrappiest enforcer for MS-13. The human body needs oxygen to fight. Without it you're weak. Without it the training is just knowledge. Kill someone's access to air, and you've won. That's not even counting the elbow spikes, which are real fuck-you-up strikes, paralysis strikes, sever-your-spinal-cord strikes.

But none of that matters here.

He has the illusion of winning for about two seconds, while the form beneath his own lies still and limp. Then there's a bunching of muscle-- no, not muscle, muscle is-- _human--_ and this isn't human. This is an earthquake. Beneath him, the other man's body _moves,_ in the same way the Mississippi moves when it floods: a shifting of entire terrains in one moment.

He feels that movement just enough to brace, for all the good it does him when the Accountant just  _ bucks  _ him off. He's flying. Up. He hits the ceiling, plows through cheap acoustic tile and into more substantial pipes and ductwork.  _ Bam _ . Crunch. Then back down. Gravity. The Accountant's picking himself up, standing, and he tries to aim to land on top of him but this time the Accountant's  _ ready,  _ and he already blew the only edge he was going to have.

The devil's right-hand man just sidesteps back from his trajectory, graceful as ballet in his business shoes. He pays Milton back for the broken nose with a knee of his own, and Milton catches it right in his gut, can't dodge, can't do anything but take the full force of it and feel at least a few ribs snapping at the impact.

“Oh, Milton, I sincerely hope you _won't_ 'make it easy',” the Accountant says with a really friendly smile down at him, as Milton rolls on the ground clutching his ribs, and then they're just beating the shit out of each other.

(This is not an honest phrasing, if Milton  _ has  _ to be honest. But it makes him feel better to think of it that way, as opposed to the one-sided ass-kicking it actually is.)

It's not like he doesn't land hits of his own, in the free-for-all that follows. It's just that it doesn't _matter_. He can drive his thumb into the Accountant's eye socket and feel it sink into a robin's-egg-blue-eye, but it doesn't make the Accountant scream or stop fighting, and on the other side of things, when the bastard picks him up like a ragdoll and slings him sideways into the solid bulk of the soda counter, he _definitely_ feels it, and would deeply prefer to lie there for a while and not do anything too ambitious beyond breathing. Just because he's _dead_ doesn't mean it doesn't _hurt._ Fuck.

But he does not get that breather, because after the counter-smashing the Accountant's still going, and all he can do is throw a punch, aim for that cheek-wound and hope he gets lucky. Lucky's never what he's been, though; his arm is caught and twisted up behind him in an arm-lock so severe that he knows another half-inch of movement is gonna dislocate that shoulder.

He elects to lie still.

“Smart choice, Milton,” the Accountant breathes in his ear, because they're close, that lanky body pinning his against the tile floor, the fine suit pressed against his dusty denim. “I knew you had it in you.”

Well, shit, if the bastard's gonna say  _ that _ ...

He snaps his head backwards and hits flesh, maybe the nose he broke earlier or maybe (oh sweet Jesus maybe) the cheek-gash.

It gets him his arm dislocated in payback, but fuck, what else could he do, right.

So after he feels that dull, excruciating pop and has done a little more useless nail clawing with his other arm at the Accountant's, what is it, his lapel? is that what his fingers found? after he's done with that and is lying there panting and it hasn't changed anything, he exhales his defeat. Good while it lasted, right.

“God _dammit_ ,” he mutters.

“Kind of the point, Milton, yeah,” puffs the wry voice in his ear. “Di- _vine_.... damnation. Ready to go home?”

“ _Hell_ no.”

“If only that mattered.”

He waits for the Accountant to get up, to drag him to his feet and collar him and march him back outside. But for a few seconds nothing happens: he has time to register the drip of a busted soda machine, the snowfall of red hot Cheetos on the floor next to him, the panicked voice of a clerk who's retreated into the back office and who's on the line to 911 by the sound of things.

He has time to register the Accountant is... smelling him.

That sharp nose is at the back of his neck, in his hair, breathing in deeply.

“\--the fuck are _you_ doing?”

“What?” says the Accountant, and abruptly the pressure is off him, the devil's bookkeeper is getting to his feet and offering him a companionable hand up. He gets up without taking it, grimacing at his useless arm that's hanging loose, a focus of astounding pain.

“The hell were you just doing, you creep?”

The Accountant just folds his hands in front of him, like he remembers him doing in the burning prison complex that Jonah King tried to make a hell on earth. Makes him look like an undertaker. Milton cannot help but think of a cat: a cat who is evincing total disinterest in the philosophical question of the canary, while it also has a yellow fucking feather on one paw.

“I'm sorry, Milton?”

He squints at him so hard he nearly gives himself eyestrain. At least there's some solace in the fact that the Accountant _looks_ fucked up, even if he's not really. His hair's mussed. His nose is flattened and crooked. Half his face is smeared bright red, and the wound on his cheek is freshly torn open, new jagged cuts all around it.

“\--is that actually your fucking blood?”

“Hm?” The Accountant lifts his fingers to his face and brings them away again, smeared scarlet. He looks down at them, perplexed. Tilts his head like a sparrow and then, delicately, touches the tip of his tongue to his fingers to taste it.

“Oh. No. I think that's cherry soda.” Pause. Lick. “No. Sorry. Strawberry.”

The wail of a distant siren pierces the air. They both look up at it, then back to each other.

“Come on, Milton,” says the Accountant, with a smile that mirrors the curved red gash on his cheek. “Time to go.”

“Fine. I'm driving,” Milton growls.

“Oh, not with _that_ arm you're not,” tuts his keeper, and shepherds him inexorably back out into the sun.


	2. sin city

When he lays eyes on the Camaro, he has been free again for all of three hours, and he’s six shots of tequila into that freedom. He can taste salt and lime on his lips when he licks them in the dry desert air. The Camaro is a COPO ZL1 9560. A fucking unicorn. He’s only seen pictures. What’d they make, sixty of them? She’s orange as a sunset, detailed to the nines, her racing stripes crisp and white. Goddamn, he could fucking cry.

When the Camaro’s owner arrives, it doesn’t hurt that he’s an asshole, that he sees Milton staring at his car and decides he needs to dickwave about it and try to act like a big man for the sake of the Vegas titty dancer on his arm; it doesn’t hurt that the guy swans and swaggers and shoves a finger in his chest and does everything else that ultimately leads to the chain of events where he hoists the asshole, bleeding, onto a chainlink fence and leaves him there--

It doesn’t hurt, but the truth is, he’d probably have done it anyway, just for the car. Some things are wasted on the living.

The screams of the Camaro’s owner drop off behind him as he tools away into the Las Vegas night. He sinks into the spotless blue leather upholstery, and strokes his calloused fingertips over the gear shift and the dash with its very few inset dials. He likes this. He likes how minimalistic it is. No bells and whistles. No cruise control, no ‘ecosystem efficiency,’ nothing but power and fire and rubber and steel.

The Camaro’s V-8 growls as he spins her through the streets, searching for someplace to really let her loose, set her free. “I know how you feel,” he whispers to the car. “Soon, baby.”

Can’t be the Strip or anywhere near it. Too many cars, too many people. Good luck finding anything other than gridlock there. He winds his way northwards, past casino after casino-- the little ones, the shitty video poker saloons and whatever else. The big bastards are all back on the Strip, but in Vegas every corner boasts a card room, and there’s slots even in the gas stations.

Finally he reaches empty streets, or near enough to it. The Strip never sleeps-- but the residential neighborhoods do, the bedroom communities and the homes full of ordinary Joes like dentists and electricians and schoolteachers. He can still see the Strip-- from anywhere in Vegas, you can see the Strip; you can see the Luxor’s beacon strobe, blasting up like it’s trying to stab heaven in the balls-- but the lights are distant.

There’s surely cops already looking for him. He doubts he’ll be that hard to find. The car is kind of distinctive.

_ Now you run for as long as there’s gas in the tank, Johnnyboy.  _ He wishes he could remember who’d said that to him.

He guns the Camaro through the quiet two a.m. streets, waking up all the good people of Northern Las Vegas, setting dogs barking. Stop signs? Red lights? What are those?

It turns out he’s not the only one with the same general idea. A car swerves out of a side street, sleek and black like a bead of oil-- ‘68 Shelby GT, nice enough, good car, great car really-- if he hadn’t seen the Camaro first. The Shelby’s more than solid. But the Camaro’s a once-in-a-lifetime car.

The Shelby whips out and paces him, the driver and his passengers shooting looks at the Camaro. It’s a couple of cholos. He nods at them, at their looks. Yeah, look. He’d be looking too.

“What is that, the Sixty-One?” the driver shouts over the roar of their mutual engines.

“No, the Sixty,” he shouts back. “ZL1.”

“ _iEsas son mamadas!”_ the driver snaps. Milton grins.

“Wanna find out?”

The driver looks at him, looks at the car, looks at him. Guns it. Milton grins bigger, and stomps the gas like it’s a cockroach.

And they race…

It can’t be that long, he knows. Before helicopters arrive, and blue and red lights in his rearview. They’re inevitable. He doesn’t even care about them; it’s the  _ other  _ pursuit that matters. But still, on the level of just reality, just the world as it is, it cannot be  _ that  _ long that he races the Shelby.

But for Milton the moments are measured in quality, not quantity. So what if it’s less than five minutes, all told. They are pure minutes. They are righteous minutes. The engine screams, exultant, triumphant-- finally allowed to do what it was made to do. He leaves rubber behind, on the pavement. He leaves the Shelby behind, too.

He flies....

The world drops to nothing, to a blur on either side of him. The visual equivalent of white noise. All he can feel is the bone-shuddering vibrations of the car and all he can hear is the roar of an engine turning dead dinosaurs into rocket fuel. Perhaps the cops have caught up with the Shelby now; he doesn’t know. He doesn’t care.

He blasts his way through suburban streets, street names appearing and lost again before he can even read the signs.The strip malls and apartment blocks give way to new construction, to the perimeter of Vegas’s suburban sprawl.

He is at peace.

A pale shape appears beside him, matching him, so smoothly that at first he thinks it’s a reflection. That he’s crossing in front of water, or glass, and this silver blur to his side is just a mirror image, a desert mirage, his own headlights or the moon’s glow in his eyes.

He looks to the side. A car. A silver car, a beast of one, a modern one, with its lights too small and an air-hood the size of the Grand Canyon. Model, make-- who knows. He doesn’t know the modern ones. He knows the classics.

It paces him, effortlessly. By the pitch of the other car’s engine it’s not even straining. That’s insane. He knows what he’ll see when he looks from the car to its driver.

“What the hell is _that_ goddamn thing _?”_ he shouts at the other driver.

“A demon,” the Accountant calls back pleasantly. He’s smiling.

“That is _cheating,”_ he snaps.

“Sorry?”

“A fucking hell… hell-car? That’s cheating, you son of a bitch!”

“\--oh. No. No, that’s the model name, Milton. The Challenger _Demon--_ Dodge, not the Devil, I’m happy to say. 2018.”

He looks at the silver monster again. He looks at the Accountant. “ _Esas son mamadas,”_ is all he can think to say.

The Accountant tsks. “Oh, that’s not nice, Milton.”

By unspoken agreement, neither of them are grinding their cars into each other, or trying to run each other off the road. The Camaro is too beautiful for that, at least Milton thinks so. He grimaces through the window at the Accountant’s big, fast, impossible, ugly goddamn car.

“Horsepower?” he shouts.

“Eight-forty!” the Accountant calls, cheerful as a pig in shit.

“BULLSHIT!” Milton yells, slamming his fist on the wheel. “That’s-- that is _imgoddamnpossible!”_

“Well, the factory model tops out at 808, but I sprung for the modifications.”

Milton hates himself for asking but it’s like picking at a scab, he yells: “Torque!?”

“Seven-seventy.”

“What the _hell?”_

“Welllll, Milton, while you’ve been being spitroasted in the boss’s basement, the automotive industry has continued to improve.”

“No,” he says, and points angrily out the window at his enemy, jabs his finger several times to emphasize the point. “ _No._ I don’t care what numbers you quote--”

“Zero to sixty in two-point-one?” the bastard all but purrs.

“... …. I don’t care _what_ numbers you _quote,”_ Milton struggles, “that is _not_ an improvement. It’s-- it’s _ugly.”_

“Well, I did once own a _very_ cute ‘63 Riviera that was probably more to your tastes,” the Accountant says with a shrug. They’re running out of city, and out of road: ahead of them is a lightless, endless desert under a half moon. (If it’s actually desert. If it’s not the Accountant pulling some shit, if it’s not the Abyss with a Capital A--) They’ll have to turn. He’s not taking the Camaro off-road.

“Yeah, what happened to it?” he yells.

“You stole it and wrecked it?”

“....Oh. Right.”

They buzz along for another two miles, curving together, following a road that is so new the streetlights on either side of it have yet to be turned on. Bulldozers sleep in the darkness, amid housing tracts yet to be born.

“Sorry,” he calls eventually.

“You _should_ be, Milton, it was a beautiful car. Almost impossible to replace. So, I took the opportunity to upgrade.” The Accountant pats his dashboard, which, from Milton’s glance, looks like it belongs in a goddamn spaceship. All glowing fuckin’ lights and screens. He hates it. The engine in it, he can tell, will be like that first car he tried to boost tonight, the fancy new Jag: all computers and wires and factory sealed parts, all sudden-death security systems that lock the engine down and prevent ignition the instant they’re tripped. Impossible to hotwire and damn near impossible to repair, too.

“You shouldn’t have just left the Riv in front of the goddamn building,” he says. “It was right there. How was I supposed to not take it, huh?”

“It was in _my_ parking spot,” the Accountant says with a little moue. “Milton, pull over.”

“One: Haha fuck you, and two, what, you get an Employee of the Month spot? Satan’s best bootlicker?”

“John, if you don’t pull over, I’m going to have to do irreparable harm to what is, frankly, a piece of art, in order to get you off the road, and I really don’t think the Camaro deserves that, do you?”

He grits his teeth. He looks around the dash. He strokes the ridges in the steering wheel with his thumb.

“I’ll tell you what, John, I’ll let you get one free hit, first.”

He gives the Accountant a thin-eyed, measuring glare between their lowered windows, then veers left, into one of the housing developments to come.

They pull to a stop in a future cul-de-sac, what is for now only a dollop of smoothed asphalt, surrounded by leveled dirt with markers sticking out of it, outlines for future condos. Milton’s feet are on the freshly-laid asphalt before the Camaro has even stopped rolling; he’s already popped the trunk. He races to it, wrenches it open, hunting, gotta be here,  _ please be here _ \--

The Accountant steps out of his car more leisurely, taking the time to fully put it in park, remove his keys, pocket them. No hurry. The bastard has all the time in eternity, right.

He steps out around his car. “Now, how do you want to--”

Milton rockets the tire iron into the side of that lean, angular face. The left side. There’s a bestial snarl of pain as his reward, and the crunch of a cheekbone losing the battle with hardened tool-grade steel.

Like back in Arizona, the Accountant’s hand comes up to shield that side of his face. Last time, Milton had switched to the unshielded, easy targets, or so he’d thought-- the rest of the head-- but hey, let it never be said Johnny Milton can’t learn.

Smash _through_ those long spiderleg fingers. Hit the wound _again._

“Oh, Milton, you little prick,” the Accountant says, hoarse but perfectly clearly, at least after he stops making that noise he makes, the not-scream. Milton grins like a mad dog and swings the iron again, into that red wreck of broken fingers and more importantly the wound beneath it.

But this time the bastard dodges. Bends backwards, too fast and fluid to be human, and the tire iron whistles over him, ruffles his hair only. The Accountant straightens back up like a released rubber band, which means _fast_ , and right into a headbutt, forehead cracking into Milton’s nose. White pain explodes in his skull.

He keeps hold of the tire iron, somehow, even as he staggers back several steps.

“ _Huuuhnn_ ,” he says, one hand on the Camaro for support.

The Accountant rolls his neck, crickity-crack, and extends his good hand, palm up. Beckons him, with his fingers. _Come on, Milton. Bring it. Let’s dance._

He absolutely knows it’s stupid, but that’s never in his life or death stopped him before.

He tries to be clever with it. He tries to feint, to act like he’s going for The Wound again only to switch targets at the last second and drive the chisel tip into the bastard’s eye. It might have fooled a human.

The Accountant just turns his head. The chisel tip slices his right cheek, just how the God-killer’s bullet once sliced the left, but this one will heal. It’s superficial. It was his best shot and it didn’t work.

For a second, in the wake of his eye-gouging gambit, they’re close: close enough to count eyelashes, close enough that his own ragged exhales through his busted nose spray freckles of blood on the Accountant’s waxen skin.

“Why do you keep doing this, Milton?” the Accountant breathes.

“Why do _you?”_ Milton answers, but then the iron hand is back around his throat and he can’t speak further. No air intake.

He gets hoisted, with a vague sense of déjà vu-- why? Why’s this familiar? Oh, yeah, he hoisted the Camaro’s owner like this, a half-hour ago, a lifetime ago-- except he did it by the guy’s collar, not his throat-- …and then he gets slammed down on the new pavement, hard enough his head bounces, hard enough he sees stars.

When they clear, he’s on the still-warm asphalt, on his back, and the Accountant’s got a knee on each of his shoulders. That hand is still wrapped around his throat. Not squeezing, not quite, but resting there. Heavy. Cool, compared to the heat of the pavement beneath him.

“Because you keep escaping,” the Accountant says, ever reasonable, and then backhands him with concussive force.

More stars. The lights of the Strip and the screaming jangle of the slots have nothing on the show going on in his skull right now. He slides to the edge of unconsciousness, that deep black quiet pool where he plunged after Jonah King shot out his eye, but he doesn’t quite go in. Just floats right there, drifting.

He expects more pain, more blows. Instead he hears a distant sigh, feels a hand patting at his chest. Like how you pet a dog. The other hand is still on his throat, the thumb against his pulse point. Maybe it’s the dizziness, but he could swear it’s rubbing little circles there.

“Because it’s my _job_ , Milton. You’re my responsibility,” says the Accountant. Fondly.

Then he grabs Milton by the hair, and slams his head down on the asphalt, and then he really does black out.


	3. babylon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> explicit sexual content in dis chapter

He doesn’t know the name of the border town he’s in any more than he knows the name of the woman he’s fucking. She might have said it. He was probably chugging Mezcal when she did.

Either way, right now he’s balls deep in her, and she’s got her nails in his spine, and the cheap bed’s creaking like a rusty gate in Tornado Alley. His own sweat stings in the scratches on his shoulders and his skin slaps against her skin and she moans loud enough to win Best Actress for sure and it feels _good,_ damn it. Pleasures of the flesh. You can forget all about them when you’re eternally burning. After this, he thinks between thrusts, he’s gonna go to that crappy-looking restaurant across the street and order the biggest steak on the menu. And hotwire that red Impala too, if it’s still there.

The door opens. Milton swears.

“Are you _fucking_ kidding me?” he yells. “I haven’t even been out a goddamn half-hour!”

The Accountant stands, of course, of course he _fucking_ does, in the doorway. One brow arched as he takes in the scene. The whore looks his way, and then back to Milton, but god _damn_ if he’s stopping.

“Milton--”

“ _No,”_ he growls. “No, you go step back outside, and you _wait,_ goddamn it. You’re gonna let me finish. I get that much.”

( _Creak, creak, creak_ go the bedsprings.)

For one long second, he thinks the Accountant’s actually going to go for it, as allergic to rudeness (or what he defines as rudeness, anyway, which doesn’t rule out shit like ‘beating you senseless’) as the guy is. The Accountant looks like he’s considering it, hand moving for the doorknob...

But: “Well, aside from the fact that I’m not really sure why you feel you ‘get’ anything... I’m afraid I can’t let you out of my sight, John. You’re just too damned resourceful. Why, I take my eyes off of you, the next thing I know you’ll have... shot me, through the door, and escaped out the window with the aid of yourrrr-- well-endowed Rahab, here.” (The Accountant favors the hooker with a wink.)

Okay, yeah, it’s true he’d actually been thinking something exactly like that. He flips the Accountant off anyway. “Well you’re gonna have to drag me off, because I’ve already paid.”

“Oh, well, gosh, if you’ve _paid,”_ says the Accountant, and shuts the door. But he’s standing on the wrong side of it, which is to say: Milton’s side of it.

Creak, creak, goes the bed, Milton lagging a little as he watches the Accountant carefully remove Milton’s jeans and jacket from the room’s single chair, and sit himself down.

“\--what, you think that’s gonna stop me?” Milton snaps. “You think I’ll get limpdick or something with you right there? Watching? Being the creep you are?”

“Hey,” gasps the woman, propping herself up on her elbows. “Hey, look, you didn’t pay for someone to watch--”

“You know, she’s right,” Milton says between his own panting and the spring-creaking he’s trying his best to ratchet back up to full rhythm. “You heard the lady, pay her.”

“ _Me?”_

“You’re the one who wants to sit there and watch.”

They lock eyes for a few beats (a few thrusts), over the bare female leg Milton has hooked over his shoulder. The Accountant produces a single silver coin from his pocket and sets it down, soundlessly, atop the bills Milton left on the room’s dresser.

“A fucking _quarter?”_ the woman bitches, but Milton hoists her legs a little higher and gets his hands under her full ass and really starts pounding.

He doesn’t take his eyes off the Accountant. It’s self-preservation. He’d prefer not to get knifed in the kidneys while he’s balling this broad, thanks. The Accountant sits there, in his thousand-bucks suit, on a folding metal chair. The room is filthy, with cracks and stains on the plaster walls and dead flies clustered on the windowsill before a dusty window, but the Accountant is immaculate and untouched. One leg crossed over the other, hands clasped on his knee. Watching him.

“You’re such a fucking _creep,”_ Milton informs him, and the Accountant smiles.

He thinks about what he can use to fight with as he continues to fuck, to bury himself between her thighs, this nameless woman, who clenches her pussy so tight around him, so fucking  _ slick  _ and  _ hot-- _

The chair’d be great if the asshole wasn’t sitting _on_ it. The bed’s not exactly wieldable. There’s a lamp, yeah, maybe. He hasn’t found a gun yet. Or a knife. He’d expected to have more time. A fucking half-hour, what can you do, in a half- _hour._

Bare-handed’s not great. Though the Accountant still has that scar on his cheek. He imagines ramming his fingers into those clear, steady eyes, then his thumbnail into the cut, snapping the stitches, forcing it back open, red and raw--

_Creak CREAK creak CREAK_ _ **CREAK**_ , goes the bed, and the hooker cries out and says, “Shit, okay, he can stay for _free--_ ”


	4. the deluge

The next time he gets out is months later and this time he finds weapons the first thing, before cars or booze or anything else. He’s in Florida. There’s some assholes running coke along the coast, using speedboats for transfer and the Everglades to hide in. They have a pretty good cache of guns, and better than guns: grenades. A rocket launcher. If you ask Milton, it’s overkill for drug running; in  _ his  _ day there was such a thing as subtlety, and what is it these punks are planning to do with all this firepower, have a shootout with the motherfucking ATF?

But the Lord works in mysterious ways, or what the hell ever, because now the guns are his. He takes one of the boats, too, a Super Vee, which is all the hell he knows about it because he doesn’t know shit about boats, he’s strictly a car man, thanks. It’s orange and blue like the Vegas Camaro, which he still misses, and it’s shaped like a knife, and it doesn’t have a cabin or anything, just the seats way back in the ass of it. He recognizes  _ speed _ , in any machine; he can guess this is the boat equivalent of long-nose bodywork. It’s like a racecar for the water.

It’s got an engine. It’s got a steering wheel. He’ll figure the rest out as he goes.

He speeds along the lush green coastline, north, chucking kilos of coke into the saltwater as he goes. _There_ goes ten thousand dollars, and _there_ goes ten thousand dollars-- hell, maybe it’s more now, it’s not like he’s exactly up to date on the going street price.

He passes no other boats. The water, under a gray and gusting September sky, is his.

In hindsight (he will think, much later), that should have been a clue.

But he doesn’t know boats, right, doesn’t know the water either. The first drops of rain spatter unnoticed on his head and hands, and then a few more, and then some more after that, and Milton abruptly realizes this is going to be a storm.

He veers for the closest island with structures. Beach houses. Empty right now. Not the season.

_ Really,  _ _**really** _ _ not the season _ , he thinks as the wind bends the palm trees horizontal to the chopping, churning water.

He struggles to keep the boat under control in the rough water. Pulling up to the dock is more of a guided collision than anything else. He doesn’t tie it off, because it won’t matter. He won’t be here long enough for it to matter. The Accountant will be here, soon. He jumps from the bucking boat to the dock, with the guns, with the last bag of the drugs because why not, and then he races for shelter.

He gives it an hour. Maybe two. Time enough to rig up all his grenades anyway. The beach house owner better have good insurance.

****

Twenty-six hours later…

The front door flies open, kicked by a black dress shoe. Milton stares at it for a moment, two, three, a long… a long,  _ fuzzy…  _ time… and then he fumbles for the shotgun and the flashlight, the two items nestled against his thigh on the couch.

“You look like a drowned… cat, man. What _took_ you so fuckin’... long…?” he breathes.

The Accountant does, in fact, look like a drowned… something. He stands in the doorway, soaked head to toe, silhouetted against the storm raging grey behind him and the occasional jagged crack of lightning that blasts light into the dark room.

“ _Well_ ,” says the Accountant, and rakes his slick, dripping hair back from his face, “well, Milton, it was a little _difficult_ to arrange transportation.”

“You’re letting in the rain,” Milton observes, as he keeps the Accountant (mostly) centered over the (slightly) unsteady end of the shotgun’s double barrels.

The Accountant steps in, and shuts the door after him. The sound of the storm plummets back to a mere dull roar. The Accountant rolls his neck, crick, crack, and tries to lock the door, only to register that his kick has destroyed the lock. Something about it strikes Milton as goddamn hilarious: the automatic primness, turning to lock up behind him like a good houseguest; the belated recognition that his own drama queen entrance fucked it up past repair; the way his fingers probe at the busted wood and then drop nonchalantly away, no-the-cat-meant-to-do-that, really.

The Accountant hears his laughter and turns to look at him, then looks again. “--Milton, are you  _ high?” _

“I got bored waiting for you,” Milton says, and lifts the fat blunt with his free hand for another toke. There’d been a zip of weed in with the last of the coke, not enough to bother with distribution, so he can only assume it had been one of the runners’ personal stash. It’s some good shit. As he’s been discovering.

“Tsk,” says the Accountant, and takes a step forward, and another, but his shoes squelch and water is puddling around him. He stops, with a grimace.

“Hey, watch the fuckin’ floors,” Milton says from the center of his own personal cloud of sweet haze.

In answer, the Accountant looks around him, presumably at the damage Milton’s done to the beach house thus far. It’s dim inside, but he doubts it stops the Accountant from seeing everything: improvised tripwires string across nearly every window. The furniture’s been rearranged to form barricades. Some things, like a large mirror that hung by the front door, and Some Vases, and Some Plates, have been broken.

...he’d tried some of the coke, in his first hour. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to get ripped to the tits on uncut dust and ratchet himself into a pulse-pounding adrenaline beast before his next fight. The bastard just hadn’t shown _up._ So he’d had a lot of energy to work off.

The weed’s nicer. He’s feeling no pain.

The Accountant squelches closer to where he sprawls on the couch. Milton follows his progress with the shotgun, even if it seems like a lot of work right now.

“Everywhere you go, Milton, you wreck things,” says the Accountant, gazing down at him. And then he plucks the joint from Milton’s fingers.

“Hey--!” He swipes back for it, clumsy and slow, easily evaded. “Hey that’s _my_ fuckin’ roach--”

“Ah, ah, ah. You _stole_ these drugs, Milton.”

“Fair and square, so roll your goddamn own.”

The Accountant smiles down at him, a weird smile, tight and sharp and wry and friendly all at once. He takes a drag, to make a point, because he’s always doing shit like that, and then he lets Milton snatch the blunt back.

“Is it even gonna work on you?” Milton can’t help but ask.

“I suppose we’ll find out. The shotgun _won’t_ , and that’s not stopping you.”

“Might ruin your day. Might ruin your suit.” A pause, as he tries to focus on the too-close figure of the other man. “Oh. Look. Too late for that.”

The Accountant looks pained, and fingers his sodden purple tie. “...do you know if the house has a dryer, by any chance?”

“Sure. Down the hall, then down the stairs,” Milton says, waving vaguely with the shotgun.

The Accountant blinks at him. “Thank you, Milton,” he says, surprised but gracious. Milton listens to him squelching away.

Three minutes later: “You know, it doesn’t seem to be working.”

“No, the power’s out,” Milton answers easily.

“You might have mentioned that.”

“I thought you could figure it out yourself, what with me sitting here in the dark.”

There’s a silence. Milton imagines the Accountant rolling his eyes, or perhaps doing that pained little exhale he does, or perhaps just gazing at the wall for a few thoughtful, distant seconds. Then: squelch, squelch, squelch, back up the stairs.

Milton twists to see him, aims the flashlight over the couch. The Accountant has his jacket off, and his tie. His white shirt is neon pale in the dim room, still plastered to the skin beneath. In his gently warped reefer vision, Milton sees him for a second as a statue cut from marble, or a mannequin; something that is inarguably not alive but is somehow still _moving._ He blinks.

“You have shoulders,” he says. The other man stops, and looks at him, brows darting towards the ceiling.

“As opposed to... _not_ having shoulders? What did you think was under my suit, Milton?”

Milton grimaces, and scrubs at his face to try and clear the fuzz. “That’s just it. I don’t know. You have shoulders. So you have-- do you have _bones_? Muscles? How’s it work, are you guys basically human on earth? Your bodies are-- I mean-- hell, what do you _actually_ look like?”

There’s a little pause, rather than an immediate smarmy comment. “It’s complicated,” the Accountant says eventually.

Milton lolls sideways on the couch, his head on the armrest and his body boneless. “Try me.”

There’s a little headshake, _no_ , and then the Accountant resumes his measured stride. He hates that stride, that even pace. He’s seen the Accountant coming his way with that walk enough times now. It means,  _ I can chase you forever. I can walk until the stars burn out. You can run, Milton, but ultimately, we both know how this ends. _

The other man disappears into the bathroom. The door shuts, a soft click, and Milton lies there with one boot on the floor and the other on an armrest, shotgun nestled to his side and the blunt wisping smoke toward the ceiling, smoke that catches silver-blue in the flashlight’s beam.

He should be running, right now. He should be plunging out into the storm. Somewhere on this fucking island there’s probably another boat, somewhere, and he could touch wires in the engine until something sparks, and disappear again, buy himself another day, or just a few more hours. He’s wasting seconds, right now, wasting his precious, precious time by not putting distance between himself and his hunter. Get up. Get up, come on, get _up_. Go.

But he’s tired. It’s dry in here, and warm, and the couch is soft, and the storm is white noise. (...and also he’s stoned out of his goddamn skull.)

The Accountant emerges after some period of time that Milton could not easily measure right now. He is toweling his hair with a towel that (Milton knows this from his earlier, daylit explorations) has seashells and starfish embroidered on it.

“Ah. You’re still here.”

“You sound disappointed,” Milton says dully.

“No, no. Relieved, honestly. It’s not fit weather out for man or beast,” the other man says, with one of his odd little turns of phrase, those 18th-century anachronisms that he delivers with the same relish he also says _Milton you ungrateful shit._

He resumes toweling himself off, and Milton watches, because there’s nothing else to do, because soon enough they’re going to get to the fighting, like they always do. He shifts the flashlight so its stark beam (were flashlights always this bright?) blasts full on the other man’s face. It earns a little grimace, and that angular head turning away from the glare.

“Milton.”

“Accountant,” he says back, tries for sassy, but a) he’s stoned and b) this is bullshit. “--what the hell _is_ your name, anyway. I can’t call you ‘Accountant.’ Fuck.”

“And why not?”

“It doesn’t exactly _trip off the tongue,_ asshole.” (Asshole, on the other hand, trips off the tongue just great.)

“Well, I’m afraid it’s what you’re getting.”

Milton lowers the flashlight an inch, so it hits torso rather than head. The spare bones of the Accountant’s face plunge back into lunar shadow, with arctic bright spots on the hatchet-edge of his cheekbone, his jawbone. He doesn’t look real. Or rather he looks  _ too  _ real, hyper-real; realer than actual reality, with every micro-fine-line on his face crisply acid-etched. Sharp and stark, like a silver gelatin print, like one of those old photos of Lincoln.

Then again, that might just be the weed.

“Come on,” he says, or slurs. “Throw me a bone.”

The Accountant settles the towel around his shoulders and stalks off to the side, out of the beam of light, unless Milton feels like moving it, but that’s too much work.

By the sound, he thinks the other man ( _demon,_ Milton reminds himself, _demon._ Right? Or a god of some sort, like he’s guessed so many times now? Psychopomp? Fallen angel? ...damned sinner, granted a reprieve and a job, like the village executioner?) is going into the kitchen, but there’s no answer. Milton scratches at his belly, his chest.

“If you don’t give me a name I’m gonna come up with something to call you,” he warns.

“If that would make you happy, Milton.”

He grimaces. “It  _ won’t  _ be flattering.”

“I’m sure I’ll be ravaged.” There’s a click-click-clicking from the darkness, and Milton’s annoyed that he can’t see what the other guy is doing, so he grunts himself higher on the couch and aims the light over. The Accountant is bent at the waist, fussing with the burners on the stove.

“Can you see in the dark?” Milton can’t help but ask.

“Well enough.” Click-click-click, and the Accountant studies the burner like a math problem that isn’t adding up.

“It’s a gas stove, dumbass,” Milton says, and when the Accountant only arches a brow at him without any real comprehension, he adds on, “The lighter won’t work without power. See if there’s matches. In the drawers.”

In the beam’s bright glare, he watches the Accountant wordlessly follow his suggestion, straightening, turning, checking drawers in his methodical, unhurried way. The third one, he finds a box, and shakes one out, and Milton watches him touch the lit match to the burner-- and nearly singe his eyebrows off since he’d had the propane on max.

It’d be funnier if the Accountant  _ actually  _ caught fire or anything, but Milton has to settle for chuckling at the momentary startled look, the head snapped back like a snake. The Accountant ignores him and, with dignity, shakes the match out before depositing it into the sink.

Milton wonders if the asshole would even burn. Hell has fire in plenty. Doesn’t seem to bother him there. But he’s probably trying to apply too much logic to it, trying to think about it like a mortal, a human, and it probably doesn’t work that way.

But it’d be nice to know for sure, because then he wouldn’t waste time rigging incendiary devices if they’re not gonna do anything, right.

\--shit, his fucking _grenades._ Milton groans, rubbing at his face. He’d had to disable most of the tripwires during the minor eternity that had stretched between his cocaine crash and the Accountant finally deciding to show his drenched ass up, due to the risk of blowing himself to pieces as he moved around the place. Where’d he _put_ them all? Somewhere he’d figured he was going to remember them, right, yeah, well, that was before he’d smoked one entire joint of premium reefer and started on a second. God _damn._

“I’m gonna… I’m gonna call you… Bob,” he says thickly.

“ _Bob?_ Why _Bob._ ” He can’t see the Accountant right now, because he slid back down the couch some, but he thinks that there’s probably that offended/bemused look on his face just like when he called him Anubis, a few years ago, which is like a thousand years in hell-years.

“Because it’ll piss you off.”

“Oh Milton, you have a strange idea of what’ll ‘piss me off,’” the Accountant says, and Milton has to admit he doesn’t actually sound pissed off. Milton takes an annoyed drag on his blunt.

“Maybe it’s short for… for Bob-noxious,” he says. “Jim-bob. Jimmy-Joe. Jimmy Ray Asshole.”

There isn’t an answer. He goes to the work of craning back up to see what the Accountant is doing.

“\--are you trying to dry your jacket out over the _stove?”_ he asks blankly.

“It’s not as if central heating is working,” the Accountant says, very reasonably.

“You drenched it with fucking salt water, it’s trashed anyway,” Milton points out. “What, does the Prince of Darkness not pay you enough for a new wardrobe?”

No answer, again. Milton supposes he shouldn’t throw the flashlight at him. Then he wouldn’t be able to see. Nngh.

“Charlie,” he says. “Chuck. Coco.”

The Accountant ignores him, and opens cabinets and the fridge with what Milton assumes is just nosy curiosity. The Accountant seems like the sort of person* who might open your mail if left alone in your house, he guesses. (*’Person.’ Entity. Whatever.)

“George,” he says around another mouthful of smoke. “Eddie. Trevor.”

“Trevor? Oddly specific.”

“An asshole named Trevor once slept with my girlfriend of the time.”

“Ah.” The Accountant peers into the dark fridge, and removes several items before depositing them into the trash can.

“ _Now_ what. Was the-- what did you just throw away.”

“Sour cream?”

“Why? Was the _sour cream_ a sinner? Did it merit damnation?”

“Well, it was just going to go bad.”

There’s a silence. Milton struggles to bully his cloudy brain into processing. “--was that a _goddamn **joke?"**_

The Accountant’s face is deep in shadow, only hints of his eyes, but he could swear that the motherfucker winks at him. Milton groans and throws his arm over his face.

“Why aren’t you kicking my ass yet, anyway.”

He doesn’t hear the Accountant moving, but when he speaks, the voice is suddenly right over him. Milton jumps as his eyes snap open. The bastard’s leaned on the back of the couch now, arms crossed on it, gazing down at him from a foot away. “All things in their time, Milton. Where’s the fire, hmm? You’re not going anywhere, not right away.”

“You’re so sure of that, huh?”

“If you were going to run, you would have already.”

If his arm wasn’t so damn heavy and floaty at the same time, Milton thinks, he’d sucker-punch that smug face. Nngh. He settles for blowing a stream of smoke up at him. The Accountant slits his eyes like a cat, but doesn’t pull away. Instead he reaches down and takes Milton’s blunt from him  _ again. _

“Goddammit,” he snarl-whines, and tries to snatch it back. The Accountant effortlessly pins his flailing wrist against the couch’s white leather, smiling down at him with that bullshit _ah-ah-ah_ smirk. For a few seconds he struggles, twisting against that inhuman grasp, but the fingers that hold him are cool and smooth and manicured and strong, strong, strong. He hisses tired frustration and lets himself sag back down into the couch.

(His other arm’s free, he’s aware. The shotgun’s within reach. Or his feet, he could bring his knee up, crunch it into the Accountant’s head. There are these things he could do.

(But it’s so much work. He’s drifting. It’s easier to lie here.)

The Accountant gazes down at him like he’s an interesting specimen, while helping himself to several deliberate drags on Milton’s joint. He turns his head to the side to breathe out the smoke, looking as he does so like a cigarette ad from the twenties, when they were illustrations, not photos-- the high-browed gentleman, in an Arrow collar, smoking a Chesterfield. Sure.

“Chester,” he says, fuzzily. It’s occurring to him, as a strangely realized fact, that this is the closest they’ve ever been when they _haven’t_ been committing violence on each other. Maybe in the car-- the Chevy. That first time. They hadn’t been fighting then.

But that had been different.

“Charlie.”

“You said that one already,” the Accountant says, chases it with a thin line of smoke.

“Did I? Shit. Okay. Uh… Wallace. Gunther. Bill.”

The Accountant laughs, short and soundless, a brief flash of even white teeth around the blunt. “Bill is clever. I could like Bill.”

“ _Bill?_ Why the fuck _'Bill’?”_

“\--oh come now, Milton, you mean that pun _wasn’t_ intentional? Tsk.”

“....I’m high as fuck, okay? Anyway, I’m not calling you _Bill._ Not if you _like_ it.”

“Stubborn, stubborn,” The Accountant chides. He’s smoking with one hand but the other is still holding Milton’s right wrist, patient as a noose. Milton closes his eyes and puts his left forearm back over his face again.

“So, what. We’re waiting until the storm dies down? Might be here a while.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, John, but personally…?” The sound of a soft exhale, and he imagines that thin-edged mouth pursed to breathe a jet-line of smoke. “I have nothing but time.”

“ _God_ , you’re annoying. We’re going to wreck this fucking house once we actually start, aren’t we?”

“Oh, maybe,” the Accountant says, sounding cheerful at the prospect.

“Sucks for the guy who owns the place.”

“Milton, are you suddenly a respecter of property rights? I find that unlikely. Anyway, I wouldn’t be too broken up about it: the owner uses this cottage as a place to fuck his mistress without his wife finding out about it.”

“Charming,” Milton says, and definitely doesn’t think about how he was never much of a respecter of marital fidelity in life, either. “Let go of my wrist.”

“Mmm… ask nicely.”

He moves his free arm enough to glare up at the Accountant. The other man is still gazing down at him, his eyes lost to pits of shadow except for where the pinprick point of the roach reflects red in them.

“Fuck you if you think I’m gonna say _please_.”

“Well, then,” says the Accountant with a small shrug of his shoulders, white cloth rustling in the dimness, and keeps his hand right there. Like how it had been around his throat, in Vegas: not squeezing, not crushing, but inarguably there. Like a manacle.

...All his life, Milton has fought uphill. All his life he’s never known when to come in out of the rain, as his momma would have said. Thrown himself against the rules like a kamikaze pilot throws himself against gravity. Done what he wanted to do, didn’t give a shit who got in his way or what enemies he made or the wrecked lives he’d left in his wake. Not as long as John Milton could walk away with what he’d felt was due him. Not as long as he could yell  _ fuck you!  _ at the universe as he went.

But Hell doesn’t care how loud you say _fuck you._ He’s learned that. Hell doesn’t care how hard you fight. Hell just doesn’t _give a shit._

Hell is the end of the road, the place where your engine coughs dry with nothing more to give, where there’s no more rides left to boost or clever shit to try. Just a forever walk across the desert for the rest of eternity, looking for a non-existent gas station, with no company but yourself. No distractions. No weed or whiskey to dull the world, no fast cars to speed away from the truth, no soft flesh to hide in for a few hot minutes.

> _ What is hell? Hell is oneself. _
> 
> _ Hell is alone, the other figures in it _
> 
> _ Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from _
> 
> _ And nothing to escape to. One is always alone. _

He should fight. Right now, he should fight, he should see just how much damage he can do to Hell with a ten-gauge shotgun point-blank right under Hell’s smooth-shaven chin. That’s what John Milton would do, defiant to the end.

But he’s tired. Still. He will be tired, he thinks, for all the rest of eternity to come.

The rain roars outside, like a vast engine, like the furnaces of Hell.

“Next time, let’s go somewhere sunnier,” he says to the Accountant.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” says the Accountant, and takes another drag, a last drag by the looks of it, because the joint’s nearly burned down to his long pale fingers. “Cuba, perhaps?”

Cuba. He thinks about it. Rum. Cigars. Dark-eyed, dark-haired women in bikinis, or topless, on endless warm beaches. The cars, of course: Studebaker Hawks. Bonnevilles. Safaris. Roadmasters. Skylarks.

“Sounds like heaven,” he says, and closes his eyes.

The Accountant lets go of his wrist. The last thing he is aware of before the oil-black of sleep claims him is the feel of cool fingers lightly twining with his own.


	5. paradise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> explicit sexual content in this one too.

The sun off the water stabs at his eyes like broken glass, and Milton squints despite his sunglasses. But he’s carrying a tourist coconut filled with rum, and there’s a Pontiac Star Chief in white and turquoise, all fins and chrome, parked ten feet away, so, life could be worse.

Or unlife, as the case may be. Whatever.

He settles on a bench. He watches the cars. He watches the women. The sun is warm and he knows he’s pale now, like a dug-up root, paler in his black clothes, but Cuba has plenty of European tourists so nobody cares about one more gringo sitting on a bench and drinking at ten in the morning.

He sits. He doesn’t think much, not yet. The first bit after getting out is always… surreal. A haze of both sensation, and the lack of sensation, the _lack_ of pain, the _lack_ of the endless video feed. It’s like coming up from deep water. It takes time just to adjust. To feel like a person again.

Other than the first time and the last time, his escaped moments have been measurable in hours at most. Less than a day, sometimes less than half a day. The first time, he could only think about the task before him, about killing Jonah King. The last time, in the beach house, he’d had time to think, alright, and that had been its own hell. Thus the coke. And the weed. And…

**...**

**......**

**..........**

A figure moves in front of him, cuts off the sun and the water.

“Hi,” says Milton.

“Hello.”

Milton lifts his head, thrown for a moment by the presence of White-Not-Black. By the glare. Because the Accountant isn’t in his usual suit, but a cream one, tropical and lightweight, a Panama hat on his head and a daiquiri in hand.

Milton rubs his face. “New look?”

“When in Rome…” says the Accountant, with a languid gesture of the daiquiri at the street around them. “Milton, I’m curious, and I’m-- well. I’m _rarely_ curious. But tell me something.”

Milton eases himself back against the bench, and stretches his arms along the sun-warmed concrete. “Shoot.”

“Why haven’t you tried to see your granddaughter?”

The fuzz of Milton’s world zags in static; the tropical sun shifts cold. His hands ball into fists on the bench, and then, slowly, slowly, uncurl.

“You broke out of _Hell_ to save her. Not exactly small potatoes. And five times since, now. That’s… impressive. We’ve done Arizona. Vegas. Texas. Florida. Aaaand Cuba. But never Louiiiieee-zeeanna.” The Accountant draws the word out in a little sing-song. Milton says nothing, while the Accountant looks down at him.

“Why is that, Milton?”

He lifts his coconut. But the straw rattles and slurks without much to fill it, and he looks down at his drink in confusion, wondering when it all got drunk. --What time is it, anyway? He stares up, out. The sun is setting. How long has he...

Fucking great. Another time out, time _free,_ and he’s lost most of it to just _sitting_ here. Fuck.

“Milton. Answer me.”

 _Fuck you,_ he could say. But his mouth is filled with coconut and rum and the sun has sunk into his bones like tar. Milton stares out over the sea, green-blue glass with the sun blazing orange across it.

“Because you were right. Last time. Everywhere I go, I wreck shit.”

The glacier eyes above him narrow briefly, studying him, dissecting him. The Accountant’s head tilts to one side, and he wonders in the way he cannot ever quite stop wondering: is he some sort of bird psychopomp? Thoth? No. Can’t be. Thoth is magic, not death. And Thoth is an ibis, and if the Accountant is any sort of bird, it’s a bird of prey. Falcon, or hawk, or some shit like that, with that beak nose and those pale, distant eyes.

A bird, or a cat. Something that hunts.

The Accountant sits down next to him on the bench, abruptly, too quickly for him to move his arm out of the way first. He starts to do it, then ignores that impulse of courtesy; why the fuck should _he_ have to move because _the other guy_ sat down? On _his_ bench.

So. So they sit like that, the Accountant’s crisp beige-and-white-and-cream shoulders touching the black denim line of his own arm.

“My turn for a question,” he says through the sugar-rum coating on his tongue.

“Shoot,” the Accountant says, mimicking his own words earlier, but with a finger gun for punctuation.

“The first time I got out....”

“Yeeess?”

“...do you think your boss planned that?”

There’s a silence. The Accountant holds his daiquiri halfway up, raised for an aborted sip, and gazes out across the water. Eventually, he asks, “Why would you think that?”

“You don’t think it was all a little too easy? His office unlocked. The gun just fucking _there_. Your _car_ right there too, when I got out of the building. Like dominoes lined up. And you’re the one who said your boss really isn’t down for kiddie sacrifice, right.”

There’s a twitch of a smile across the Accountant’s reptilian face. “I did say that. But I promise you, my pursuit of you was genuine, not theatre.”

“Oh, no, _you_ were absolutely gunning for me,” Milton agrees. “ _But_ you didn’t know I had the Godkiller. That was a big fucking surprise to you. What, did the boss not _warn_ you? You, his favorite CPA? Ouch.”

There’s a disdainful little sniff from the other man. “He isn’t one for micro-management.”

“Sure, sure. But what if I’d actually killed you, huh? Landed that shot?”

“Then I’d no longer exist,” says the Accountant, with a measured calm that makes Milton feel sure that whatever he actually is, demon or god or whatever, he was never once a human. Never that. “Someone… or something... else would take over my function and my duties.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Oh, I don’t _want_ to die. But I’m not as burdened by a sense of my own exceptionalism as you are, Milton.”

He slurks some more of the dregs of the coconut-rum slurry through the straw, feeling vaguely depressed about that statement for no good reason. The first time, he’d felt like hot shit, to some degree. Especially at the end of things. Sure, he was getting dragged back to hell, but goddammit, he’d  _ won _ . He’d come back from the dead and set out to do what he meant to do. How many people could say that? He’d even thrown his cocky boast at the Accountant: that he would just get out again.

And so he has. Multiple times now. None of them have felt like the first time. At the end of each he just feels exhausted.

“So,” says the Accountant. “Your theory is that my boss intentionally enabled your original escape, in order to allow you to wreak vengeance on some _really_ tacky cultists and save an innocent soul. Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Milton says with his voice still thick with rum.

“Then how do you account for the times since then?”

“I don’t know,” Milton admits. “That’s the flaw in my theory. I haven’t saved any, you know, kittens or puppies or babies or anything, the last couple of goes.”

“No. You haven’t,” the Accountant tsks. “You’ve been busy sating your baser pleasures.”

“Hell _yeah,_ I have. Anyway, it seems like you dickheads ought to chain me up somewhere deeper, each time. But I’m still getting out.”

“You are.”

Milton settles the emptied coconut between his knees. “Why?”

“Isn’t it just that you’re that much of a badass motherfucker?” the Accountant drawls mockingly.

He snorts without humor; he sinks down a few inches, spine curved to the concrete of the bench. “Let’s be real: there’s badder.”

“True. There’s me.”

“You’re not a fucking badass, you’re just a _creep,”_ he shoots back. “I’m not talking about _you._ I’m saying, what, I’m the _only_ son of a bitch who’s had the will to get out? Seems unlikely.”

“Unlikely, yes, and untrue. I told you before, Milton: you’re not the first to get out. And you won’t be the last.”

“Okay,” Milton says, but he leans over to wag a finger in the Accountant’s face, feeling as he does so exactly like any number of old, drunken men who in nameless bars over many years have done just the same to him, before telling him at length their theory about the Saudis or the homosexuals or the Jewish international banking conspiracy-- “ _okay,_ but--

“But how many of them are _repeat_ fugitives? Huh? Answer me that.”

The Accountant looks at him sidelong, the corners of his eyes crinkling like tissue paper. “Oh, well in _that_ , yes, you’re unique. Nobody else has six escapes to their name. So perhaps you  _ are  _ the baddest motherfucker after all, John Milton.”

Milton looks forward again, out to the glass-and-tinfoil sea, darkening except where the sunset scratches the surface gold. He pulls his arm off the bench, down into his lap, his hands resting around the coconut.

“Is it you?” he asks at last.

The Accountant languidly crosses his legs at the ankle, stretches back onto the bench in the space Milton’s arm has just vacated. His own arm splays across the back of the bench, like nothing so much, Milton thinks, as the long wing of a condor. Or a vulture, maybe. Claiming the dead space. “Is it me, what?”

“Someone’s _letting_ me get out. It’s you. Isn’t it.”

A laugh, light, white teeth flashing red in the sunset’s glow, a hint of canines just a _little_ longer than a regular person’s--

“Why would I _possibly_ do that?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Milton snaps.

“Well, it’s not a very coherent theory, then, is it? Apply yourself, Milton. Give your brain half the workout you’ve been giving your poor victimized liver.”

Milton chucks the coconut at him, just snatching it from between his knees and trying to bean him right in the face with it, on the scar preferably. The Accountant is faster. The arm that’s on the bench behind him never moves, but the other one does. It must, anyway, because before the coconut hits, it is intercepted, one pale long-fingered hand holding it, perfectly steady, between them. The bastard even set his daiquiri glass down somewhere in that split second.

“Temper, temper.”

He opens his mouth to respond but before he can the Accountant grabs his hair, with the other arm: just helps himself to a handful of it, right at the base of Milton’s skull, and wrenches his head backward and to the side with that grip, manhandles him, so they’re looking right at each other.

“Why would I possibly do that?” he repeats, his glass-chip eyes drilling holes through Milton’s skull.

“God-fucking-ow- _damn-_ it _,_ let me _go_.”

“ _Think,_ Milton. _Think,”_ the Accountant hisses, low, intense, urgent. He was readying to punch him, but that tone brings him up. Reminds him of their standoff over Piper. The tight tension in his gut then; the awareness that all his bravado was just that, when weighed against the knife at Piper’s throat.

“I don’t _know,”_ he rasps. The Accountant’s eyes hold his own a moment longer before sliding away. Annoyed. Disappointed? What the fuck. He tests the grip on his hair but it’s firm, of course it’s firm, it’s always goddamn firm. Milton sags back rather than fight it, and scrubs at his face with both hands. He thinks. He tries to. The sun has baked his head, he’s pretty sure. Boiled his brain in its own rum-based marinade.

He opens his eyes. The Accountant still has that bitch of a one-handed grip on his hair, still has his head held uncomfortably far back, but he’s set down the coconut and has picked up his drink again. In that suit, he looks like a rich goddamn tourist. Sipping his fucking  _ daiquiri. _

“I bet I’m the only time you get out of the office,” Milton says slowly. “This is your way of getting a vacation.”

“No,” says the Accountant, then pauses, and smiles an alligator smile. “Well. I _do_ enjoy it here. The air, the smells, the sights... But it’s a perk. Not the reason.”

“So there _is_ a reason,” Milton smirks with a finger jab in midair. “You just admitted it.”

The Accountant twists his hand in Milton’s hair enough that he winces despite his internal resolution not to give the bastard the satisfaction. “Keep trying, Milton.”

“Well damn it, I don’t _know_ beyond that,” he rasps. “Unless it’s just that you want my hot, hot body. You’re _obviously_ goddamn obsessed with me.”

He means it as half-taunt, half-insult. The Accountant only smiles again.

“...you _are_ a creep,” Milton mutters.

“It’s _not_ the reason,” the Accountant says. His smile grows, to something composed entirely of too-long, too-white teeth: a Colgate surface sparkle over antediluvian levels of menace and dentition. “But sure. Another _perk_. Yes. Yes, I could just _eat_ you all up, John Milton. In all your stained, sleazy, rotting, bad-bleach-job--” he yanks on Milton’s hair, hard enough to hurt, “--probable-STDs, cut-rate-criminal glory. If soul were a foodstuff, John, you’d be the mystery meat tacos at a roach coach. And who doesn’t love a guilty pleasure, hmm?”

Milton breathes shallow, side-eyeing the Accountant pretty hard.

“Just to clarify,” he manages after a few seconds, “you don’t mean _literally_ eat me, right? That isn’t a thing you do?”

“Now now, John. You must leave me some of my air of mystery.” The hand in his hair twists further, pressure becoming pain until his head is forcibly turned with it and when it’s right on the edge of making him ready to fight regardless of how much it’s going to hurt-- the Accountant lets go.

The son of a bitch pulls his hand back. Lifts it to his mouth. Sniffs at his fingers first, like a dog, and then licks them, like a cat. His eyes stay locked on Milton’s the whole time.

“You are fucked _up_ , do you know that,” Milton says.

“And you’re _not?”_ his hunter asks. “Dead man walking? Spreading more of it, everywhere he goes? That’s the thing about hell, John. It’s a state of being. You take it with you.”

Milton pushes himself up from the bench rather than answer. It’s getting dark. The sun is setting; along the coast lights are winking on, houses, apartments, streetlights. Headlights.

“Let’s go steal a fucking car,” he says, and the Accountant laughs.

****

They wind up in a beautiful 1953 Buick Skylark, cream white with a pristine red leather interior, a car he could easily have fallen in love with even if his heart lives fifteen years later-- _except for_ The Tragedy.

It goes like this: they walk the darkening streets, tropical dusk coming on them like a cloak but the mosquitos leaving them both alone. Maybe there’s one good thing about being dead. They look at the cars, and there’s a lot of good cars to look at, and it’s all they talk about. Not sin or judgment or evil deeds or whatever fucking ineffable purpose the Accountant sees to all of this. Just cars. Just camshafts and carburetors. They talk about them like two men might discuss beautiful women on the beach by day, oh, look at that one, yeah, sure, but how about  _ her. _

The cars of Cuba are like candy: fifties pastels lovingly kept in precisely those shades, the baby blues and the bubblegum pinks and the future-is-now aquas. Hours of waxing and buffing to make them shine how they do right now, under a full moon and the intermittent, unreliable street lights. American cars are family heirlooms here, passed on, tended like a prize cow, polished and repolished and repaired as many times as necessary. They gleam; they beckon him, promising him an easy boost and a smooth ride.

They pass up several candidates before they mutually notice the Skylark. Milton looks at the car, and looks at it again. His companion looks once, and then looks at the house it’s parked in front of, for a bit, and then he nods, while Milton is busy popping the locks and cooing sweet nothings to his new sexy lady.

“I’m driving,” Milton says, and the Accountant looks wry but takes the passenger seat without an argument.

It’s two blocks before the love affair ends: the car looks beautiful but runs like a clinically depressed turtle. Milton stops the car, to check the engine, because she feels like she just isn’t getting enough gas, and he gets out and pops the hood.... and finds heartbreak waiting, in four cylinders.

“The hell is _this?”_ he says, aghast. The Accountant joins him, leisurely, peers over his shoulder into the guts of the engine.

“A transplant from a Russian Lada, I’d say. Probably from the 1980s.”

Milton makes a wounded noise. “This is heresy.”

“There, there,” the Accountant mocks, and pats him on the shoulder. He barely notices.

“No. No. This is _wrong._ She’s meant to have a V-8, for Chrisssake!”

“Milton. In theory, I agree with you, but don’t be naïve; these cars haven’t had access to replacement parts from the US in six decades. What did you expect?”

He processes that with dawning horror. All the cars. All the cars they’ve passed. The ones looking like freshly glazed bon-bons and fantasies-in-chrome. All of them will have been modified, jury-rigged, bastardized with foreign parts and whole new drive trains, with weld jobs to force transplants against all natural order.

He gets back in the Skylark, and then he sits there, behind the wheel, the wires he needs to touch to make the car go dangling beneath the wheel, forgotten. The Accountant gets back in on the passenger side and sighs.

“I take it I won’t be chasing you to Cuba again?”

“You fucking think?” Milton exclaims. “This is the land of fucking Frankencars. _Jesus._ ”

“I’m still trying to figure out why this was a shock to you. Sixty years is long enough for--”

“It’s been forty for me, okay?!”

A sigh. “ _Forty_ , fine; after forty years even the most well-tended car will have  _ breakdowns.” _

Milton gestures angrily out at the street, the car itself. “Yeah! Okay! Fine! But a  _ four-cylinder--” _

“Milton, shut up,” the Accountant says, and grabs him by the shirt front and just physically _pulls him_ across the width of the seat-- one thing about old cars, it’s those full bench seats, all the way across-- and then the Accountant’s predatory mouth is on top of his, swallowing the rest of his bitching.

Sharp teeth. Sharp tongue, jagging into his own mouth like a fork of lightning. Lingering hint of lime and booze from earlier. The inhumanly strong hands in his shirt have pulled it taut; the fabric bites across the back of his arms and shoulders. His knee barks against the dash as he struggles. He wrenches his head back.

“You think I’m gonna roll over for _you?”_ he snarls, and then he goes for the bastard’s face, clawing for the eyes, for the scar. He manages to catch one stitch with his thumb, and the Accountant answers by grabbing both his wrists. Hard enough he feels it like a blow, a strike: the bones in the Accountant’s pale hands slamming into the bones in his wrists, bruising impact. Followed by capture.

By this point he knows he can’t break that grip. He struggles anyway. He growls, and he twists and wrenches and jerks and _fights it._ They lurch back and forth on the leather of the seat, eyes locked, Milton’s teeth bared like an animal’s, the Accountant’s bared too but in a breathtaking grin, delighted, nightmarish. Milton cusses him out with the foulest words he knows, and in answer the Accountant laughs, light and merry. He forces Milton’s hands down, down, down to the leather of the seat. Taking his time about it. Milton’s straining every muscle, firing every piston, sweating like a pig in the tropical night. The Accountant isn’t even working hard. Like his goddamn Dodge Demon against the Camaro.

“Kiss my ass,” he spits as his hands are pinned.

“Oh, would you like that, John? What about if I bit it? What if I ate you out, fucked you with my tongue and made you beg for it? Would you do that for me, John, would you ask me nicely _then_?”

The humid air is fiery and sticky in his lungs. He sucks in great breaths of it, wondering if he looks as wild-eyed as he feels. “You’re insane.”

“That’s technically not a no,” the Accountant purrs. He shifts his grip on Milton’s wrists, transferring both of them to just one of his hands, and if the dickhead was _human_ then _yeah,_ he could break this hold, he fucking _could,_ he tries to anyway, but no, the Accountant one-handed is still stronger than all his human muscle. The other hand, free now, slides to his neck. It circles his throat, dry and cool like snakeskin, no pressure, but _present_ , forcing him to be aware of it, of what it could do.

“Would it _matter_ if I said no?” Milton rasps.

The Accountant's eyes lift to his own, with a brow arch: that almost-comical look of indignation crossing his features, offended as any middle-manager accused of impropriety could be-- “Well, I’m not a _rapist,_ John. Those are the sort of people I exist to contain.”

The Accountant’s thumb strokes back and forth over his blitzing pulse point, sliding through his sticky sweat. His head is slightly back, watching Milton through half-lidded eyes, down the length of that aquiline nose, his thin lips slightly smiling, slightly parted (Milton thinks of a snake, scenting the air, with its tongue--). Milton breathes, ragged and whistling.

“ _Are_ you saying no?” the Accountant asks, so goddamn politely. Milton leans his head back as best he can, looks past that lean, keen face to the world beyond it.

The streetlights flicker amber overhead, surrounded by clouds of large soft-winged moths and crane flies. Cicadas, or crickets, or something, are chorusing in the night, a droning background to the distant sounds of car horns and slamming doors. The world of the living stretches out around him-- houses full of families, streets full of people, normal people, like Piper, people who have jobs, and spouses, and children. There's street meat being cooked somewhere, mingling with the sweet scent of mariposa in full blossom, and the more distant smell of the sea; there is  _ son cubano  _ music drifting from the doorways of bars and the windows of houses; there is a white dog slinking down this quiet street sniffing for trash or scraps. The world: a place he can steal back to for snatches, here and there, but can never rejoin. He already had his shot.

Now it's time to pay the devil his due.

“I'm saying,” Milton licks his salt-chapped lips, “that I'm not gonna make it easy for you.”

“Oh _good,”_ the Accountant breathes, and then he starts to squeeze. Milton can _feel it,_ his trachea being crushed in on itself by a hand that can snap bones like matchsticks. His breath whistles in his compressed throat. The eyes fixed on his own reflect the fat tropical moon overhead: watching him, waiting to see what he's going to try to make good on his words.

His hands are still gripped. Can't headbutt. So. What?

He twists enough to bring his knee up, above the bench seat, and his foot too, slams the heel of his boot into the Accountant's ribs in a hooking crescent kick that's honestly pretty shitty, it has no power behind it, not from this position, but the Accountant _hwufs_ a little all the same, with his eyes crinkling as if to say _oh yes, good effort, Milton,_ and now that his foot's up enough he can bring his knee up too, then piston his boot down, leading with the heel, driving it between the Accountant's thighs and into his groin in what would be a fatherhood-ending, nut-crushing blow on a person.

The Accountant only grunts, spine curling a bit forward, grip loosening a fraction. Just enough to wrench his hands free. And he knows, he knows very damn well, that the last time he kicked the Accountant in the dick it didn't get him that much, so, okay, fine, the bastard is _playing,_ playing _along--_

“Don't you fuckin' patronize me,” he wheezes through a mad-dog grin of his own, and clamps his fingers around the other man's jaw so that he can drive his thumb into the cheek gash and _really_ fuck it up.

He feels the stitches snapping, he feels raw meat under his pressing thumb, good, _good,_ he keeps grinding it deeper while the Accountant gasps and snarls like a wounded beast, writhing on the leather seat. “Yeah, do you like _this?”_ Milton rasps, savoring the look of actual _pain_ on the other man's face like a fine whiskey. “Does _this_ do it for you, you twisted bitch? You're gonna have this fucking gash forever, aren't you? Here til Judgment Day? Yeah, you're gonna remember me alright, how wide do you think I can work it, huh, down to the bone or--”

The only thing that stops him going further is that the wound starts smoking. “--the _fuck?”_ Milton yelps, because dead or not, he can still be surprised. He snatches his hand back. Or starts to, but he doesn't get far before his wrist is captured again, this time not by a manicured hand but by teeth. Teeth: the Accountant's head just snaps _down_ and that mouth closes on his wrist. A beast. A beast that walks like a man, that talks like a man, that looks like a man, but the teeth on his wrist are sharp.

They don't break skin, though. He's aware of that, in the midst of this surreal moment where the scent of tropical blossoms mingles with the smell of smoking flesh. If he didn't know what his own meat smells like, burning, it'd probably gross him out more, but, frankly, he's over that. He's been over that one for years now. The Accountant worries at his wrist, teeth rasping and dragging and _playing;_ it's all still play for him. This _thing_ that is so deeply not human _likes_ him, and sheathes its claws, and says _take your best shot._

The Accountant's been waiting for him to take his best shot since back in Arizona, he realizes.

There's tongue as well as teeth, a tongue lashing at the skin of his inner wrist like the devil means to lick a hole in it, and _hard_ sucking. His wrists are still sore from earlier, hell, they're probably bruised, and they're gonna be more so, he can envision it, a ring of yellow-green blotches all around his wrists and pink rosettes on the inside, aching and tender.

He grabs the back of that corporate haircut with his free hand, a fistful of styled hair just how the Accountant had grabbed him, right to the base of the skull. He wrenches backward, and the Accountant goes with it – he could resist but he doesn't – he lets Milton pull him off and smiles at him, a drunken smile, a wolf's lolling grin, his lips gleaming with spit.

“Ohhhh you taste like a _gutter,”_ he breathes, his pupils blown.

“Yeah? Let's see,” Milton says, and yanks him in hard by his handful of hair.

Their mouths meet the way their bodies have before: violently. Teeth hit lips – bite – snag – tongues press and thrust and fight for entrance – they bang foreheads – his stubbled jaw scrapes against the Accountant's smooth one – and when they finally settle into something more like a kiss than oral warfare, Milton can taste blood in his mouth. It's probably his. He's still never seen the guy bleed; he's still not sure he even _does._

They're tangled in the middle of the seat, the steering wheel jammed against Milton's back, legs in each other's way. Milton hasn't fucked another guy since prison (earth prison, that is) but his dick is having zero reservations about it. And it doesn't seem like his stomp of earlier totaled the Accountant's transmission either. So to speak. He can feel the bastard is hard, can feel it against him as they struggle for who's got whose legs over the other's, a little knee to the gut here, a little slap there, mouths locked nasty to each other the whole time. He still has one hand fisted in hair that smells clean and expensive, some bullshit hair gel or whatever that costs more than a twelve-pack, at least, and his other hand is back at the Accountant's cheek, fucking around with the last unpopped stitch.

The Accountant has _his_ hands on Milton's fly. Button snapped open, and the zipper goes with a shrill noise of shearing metal.

“\--did you just break my fucking pants?” he growls against those sharp, white teeth.

“Well, I could break your ribs instead,” comes the whisper back, tongue flickering against his lips, pressing at a raw salted split in his lower one. One hand slithers up Milton's belly, curves over his sweat-damp tee and molds to his flank, his ribs, fingers slotting in the gaps between them and pressing just hard enough that Milton knows it's not an idle threat.

“Do it, and I'll rip this stitch totally out, you goddamn pain slut.”

 _“_ _I'm_ the pain slut? You're the one addicted to picking fights you can't win. And you were going to do that anyway,” chuckles the Accountant, laughs it against his bloodied mouth, soft and soundless and panting, and yeah, fair enough, he _absolutely_ was. “But given it's your only way to actually hurt me, John, do you really want to blow it so soon?”

“You warning me against premature evisceration?” Milton deadpans, and the Accountant really laughs at that one, breaks the kiss fully to throw his head back and toss his ringing mirth to the warm night air.

“This is why I like you, Milton; you do make me laugh.”

For a second or two he just grins back, like how they'd grinned at each other after Jonah was dead. As if they were not hunted and hunter, sinner and inquisitor-- but old friends at a bar, alternating between amiably talking shit and finishing each other's sentences. Drinking beer, maybe. (Skullware optional.)

“What, you're telling me Hell's not a funny place?”

“Let's just say it's a very.... _gallows_ humor,” the asshole smirks, his eyes dancing, dark now in the night. The smile makes the gash on his face move too. It's a viscerally ugly thing, a black-red strip of wreckage against waxen skin, wrenched wider by Milton's thumb earlier, the snapped stitches hanging loose. It's stopped smoking, at least. Milton's pretty sure he's more bothered by it than the Accountant is. He almost asks, _does it hurt._

But while he's weighing that, the pros and cons, the Accountant is shouldering out of his white suit jacket. Milton watches him, taking that tiny breather, bracing to see what comes next, if it's going to be kiss or fist, pinch or punch.

He has to admit that he wasn't really considering 'blowjob' as one of those options. But after he slides off his jacket, the Accountant twists around, like an eel, and slithers down off from the seat and goes-- directly for Milton's dick.  _ Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. _

“Oh, fuck _me,”_ Milton blurts as those hands open up his busted jean fly, grab his BVDs, and tug outward. His cock springs free, bobbing in the thick night air, sure, yeah, stomp-the-gas-let's-go--

“If you ask nicely,” the other man purrs, and then his mouth is _on_ Milton, barely a lick before he's going zero to sixty and just _swallowing_ him down, one motion, one slick engulfing, and Milton slams his head back against the driver-side door hard enough it hurts. “ _Christ!”_

If the Accountant feels even the slightest bit of self-consciousness about the fact that he's half-kneeling on the floor of a stolen car, his sleek head buried in Milton's lap, greedily deep-throating him-- it doesn't show. Every time he's ever had his dick in another guy's mouth before-- prison, again-- it's been at least halfway a power thing, a lesson thing, making sure everyone knows who's bitch and who's not in the equation, because that's important, on the inside. According to the formula, Milton should feel like the one in charge here; according to the formula, the Accountant should hate this.

The formula does _not_ reflect the reality. Milton jerks and whines as those teeth drag along the vulnerable skin of his prick, _threat-threat-_ _ **threat**_ because that's the Accountant's first language, even when the claws are sheathed the fact that there _are_ claws is not ignorable. 'Playing nice' implies that nice is not the fucking default. The teeth don't break skin, don't savage him, but the bastard definitely lets him know that he _could._

That shouldn't be a turn-on, but, well, here they are.

He tries to scrabble his way back to more familiar territory. He gets his hands in the Accountant's hair again, two fistfuls of it, gripping tight. “I'm gonna fuck your mouth raw,” he promises.

The Accountant glances up, just enough to quirk a playful brow at Milton. _Take your best shot,_ he says, without saying a word.

...right. Cool. No possible chance he's gonna get his dick bit off, huh. Put your money where your mouth is, Milton. Shit or get off the pot.

Milton shifts his grip on the Accountant's hair, going up near the top of his head, and then seizing and twisting until the strands bite into his own fingers. And then tighter past that. The purple sheen of the Accountant's tie catches his eye and what the hell, he has two hands. He grabs the tie too, wraps the silk around and around his hand until his fist is right under that pointed chin, his knuckles up against that smooth throat. Through it all the Accountant doesn't move: just stays right there, lean cheeks hollowed around Milton's cock, waiting, watching. At this angle his eyes are invisible-- dark caves that swallow the ambient glow, that leave him nothing to guess at. There's only that sense of waiting. Patient as a guillotine.

(...'Guillotine' was really not the thought he needed to have just now. Not with his dick where it is. Welp.)

He takes a breath. He grits his teeth and he starts to thrust.

No bite, no sting, no fire of punishment. The mouth around his dick is tight in all the right places, tongue wet and sliding along his shaft, teeth still _there_ but careful, careful, restrained. It's like getting head in a goddamn minefield. But it's not like danger's ever been a turn-off for him.

“Tell me, did you learn to suck cock by practicing on your boss, you know, the one whose ass you're always kissing--” Milton asks after his first few thrusts, as he's finding his pace, “--or is just natural talent?”

That razor-boned face tilts back, enough that the moonlight hits his eyes again, looking up at him with a _Really, Milton?_ sort of look. Milton wrenches his head back down by merit of the grasp on his hair and shoves deep, until his short hairs are jammed against the other man's nose.

“The best part,” he adds on, “about this,” god, yeah, this is good, this slick-tight-sucking, “whole thing? You want to know?” He doesn't wait for an answer; it was rhetorical. “It's that it makes you _shut the fuck_ _ **up.”**_

There's a guttural, muffled snort in response. Milton presses his knuckles more firmly against the Accountant's throat. His skin feels cool to the touch, not cold, but compared to himself... cooler. There's no racing pulse, though he hunts it with his thumb. There's no pulse at all.

“You goddamn creepy freak,” he mutters, and all the same digs his fingers in on either side of the other man's windpipe (at least he has one of those). “Come _on_ , goddammit. _Feel_ _this, you unholy prick--”_

He starts skullfucking the bastard. Holding the Accountant's head in place by throat and hair, jackhammering his mouth harder than he can recall doing it to anyone, man or woman, prison or out of it. Prison had been about self-preservation, ultimately: showing he was not a fucker to be messed with. But this? This is about--

\--this is about--

\--actually he has no goddamn idea what this is about. Other than Hell's head-guard-and-bookkeeper being a pervy fucking lunatic. Who apparently is just as down to let Milton fuck his mouth as he is to beat the shit out of Milton, and between the two, one of those is, admittedly, less painful.

It's about pain, maybe. It's about how raw he feels, every time he gets out, every time the agony of perpetual immolation fades back to the real world, how loud and bright it is, how even the wind itches against his skin, how he has to knock back enough liquor to blind a man, and fuck any willing hole, and devour everything he can, every cheap pleasure he can, for as long as he can-- he has to stomp the pedal to the floor and grind it there, redlining the engine, burning up the gas until he collides with the wall. And the Accountant is that wall. He's been throwing himself against it, over and over, like the asshole said, picking fights he can't win, because--

– because –

Because the ass-kicking you wade into with eyes wide open is better than the one you have no control over. Something. Something like that.

Or maybe it's guilt, he thinks. Maybe it's all part of how he never goes near Piper or Webster or his granddaughter, any time he gets out; how he just runs while knowing he's going to be found, by _him._ He doesn't deserve _that:_ that snapshot of the life he could have had. He deserves no better than this: _this_ smug son-of-a-bitch, who fucking enjoys breaking his bones and--

\--and... and also, apparently, deepthroating him. Whatever. Run with it.

So that's what he's doing, running with it, hands gripping and crushing and fisting as he fucks the other man's mouth, forces that dark, sleek head down onto his own swollen prick over and over and over.

“Who knew you were such a whore, huh?” he rasps between the piston-thrusts of his hips. Even the shit-talking’s heady with the awareness that he _might_ manage to piss the Accountant off. “God, look at you, you cocksucking slut, you're fucking eating this uh _hhn!”_

A hand-- pressing forward into his jeans, shoving and making room for itself with a popped denim seam, curling around his balls like a claw. Milton's yelp jags up an octave as the Accountant executes some wordless trash talk right back at him with nails and threat, a firm reminder that the power is still all his. Milton stills, because if he doesn't he thinks his balls are getting ripped off or lacerated or something else really fucking unpleasant, and for a second neither of them moves a single muscle, frozen: Milton straining and sweating, swallowing convulsively between the mindless urging of his throbbing dick and the more plaintive message from his trapped balls. And the Accountant poised with latent kinetic energy, the blade about to fall.

Then the Accountant pulls back, deliberate, all the way back the length of his prick. The night air is warm, but it's cold on his spit-shiny cock, which hasn't been this exposed to the air in what feels like goddamn hours. Milton hears a little whine-growl escape his own mouth.

All the way to his crown, and then the bastard licks there, delicate, prim, like a fucking  _ cat-- _

“What a _filthy_ little mouth you have, Milton,” he whispers, lips brushing and taunting and ghosting against his cockhead. His dick _twitches,_ it aches to be buried again-- but when he hazards the slightest of shifts forward the pressure on his balls becomes a vise.

“Careful,” the Accountant purrs. “Careful, now. _Think_. Make a smart choice.”

He could punch him, he really could. Right in his goddamn smirk. Right in the scar. Milton groans, his hands fisting the hair he's messed up, open-close-clutch, open-close-clutch. His other hand presses sweaty-palmed against the other man's cool throat. He holds still.

The Accountant says, “Good,” and licks him again, and a curse rips from his throat despite himself. It's just that it's _wet,_ it's flickering and fast and right against his fucking cockslit, grade-A whore-technique alright, and he shudders-- and then tenses, expecting pain--

\--but the hand has eased again, fingers settled curved behind his balls but just resting there, claws sheathed once more. He follows the unspoken demand just fine, loud and clear:  _ keep staying still. Don't move. _

Whose _fucking_ idea was this, anyway?

The Accountant's, of course. Milton's always one step behind these days. He'd be pissed off about it, but most of his attention right now is engaged in keeping his brakes locked in tight, keeping still, doing what he's told (goddammit) and having the head of his dick licked like a goddamn all-day sucker.

“Huuu-uhh-uh--” Milton wheezes, grabbing his handful of hair tight enough his _own_ fingers hurt, as the tongue dips and flicks and flutters and probes and slithers over just this tiny, tiny bit of skin, and this is some bullshit alright. Some goddamn--

“Milton, I want you to say please.” The voice is mellow and even, the breath against his cock-tip cool and steady. Milton's eyes snap back open.

“ _Fuck_ you,” Milton growls. “No. And you don't have Piper here to threaten, so now what, dickhead? You gonna crush my balls for it?”

Those fingers flutter against the back of his sac, considering, but then the Accountant shakes his head. “No; by this point, Milton, I accept the fact that punishment is only so effective, with you.”

“\--then why do you keep _hurting me,_ you _shit?”_

“Oh, that's just because I enjoy it,” he answers, and before Milton can retort to that with some really choice profanities those fingers shift, and jam _up,_ between his legs, behind his balls, and apparently there's some spot there that is a direct fuel line to a red hot combustion zone because Milton loses a few seconds.

His vision sparks white and black. His breath hitches in his chest, wheezes out of him. Who the hell is making that _noise,_ that shaky sound, Jesus, is that _him?_

“...the fuck?” he pants weakly, and the hand invading his Levi's _presses_ again. Thumb rubbing between his balls and his asshole, driving up, that _spot_ again, “ _Jesus fucking--”_

“Carpenter,” murmurs that goddamn voice, smooth and steady and sounding altogether too goddamn satisfied, and Milton has no damn idea how a minute ago he was deep-dicking this asshole's mouth and now _he's_ the one twisting on the car seat like a goddamn hooker with a crotch itch--

The fingers push. Press and push and probe, and each time, sparks behind his eyes, and hot honey boiling down in his gut, and Milton becomes distantly aware that his hands have found shoulders, solid shoulders, under a crisp white dress shirt. He hangs on. And tries to wrench his brain out from the warm tar.

“What-- what're you--”

“I'm trying out positive reinforcement, Milton. Tell me, is it working?”

Before Milton can answer, his dick's back in the bastard's mouth. Sudden like before, entire, no tease just _in,_ swallowed down, in time with another inescapable push from the long fingers that have invaded his jeans--

“ _FUCK!_ ” Milton howls, and smacks his head back against the door, and scrabbles his nails across the seat's leather, and bucks like a fucking possessee at a tent revival--

He's had a lot of pussy in his time, and a middling bit of ass, but this is goddamn new. His legs are confined in his jeans, the denim binding across his thighs, there's a  _ bastard  _ hand behind his balls finding spots he didn't fucking know he had, and his brain is being sucked straight out his dick as he twists helplessly around on the seat of a '53 Buick. Welcome to 2018, huh.

Milton jerks in the half-thrusts that his position allows, up into the mouth, down onto those _goddamn_ fingers. He can't claim it isn't getting him there. He can work with this, alright, he can feel it building in his balls, his slamming pulse ratcheting higher, he's gonna--

The mouth pulls away. “God _dammit!”_ Milton snarls, and grabs at the back of the Accountant's head, tries to haul him right back where his dick wants him-- but it's like pulling on a steel bar, this time, no more indulgence. He stares down his own body at the bastard, furious need blasting through him.

“God _fucking_ damn it finish what you started you son of a _bitch--”_

Accountant smiles at him, one hand curled around his raging dick, holding it still. The other's still buried down between his legs. “Say please, Milton.”

“ _SCREW_ you,” he pants, and tries to grind down on the fingers. They retreat, smooth and deliberate, deny him any sort of satisfaction.

“Milton,” the Accountant breathes, and in between his words he tilts his head to the side, darts his tongue over the swollen purple head of Milton's captive dick, “I can do this over, and over, and over. I can do this until you can't walk. Until your cock is raw and you're crying for release like a baby for its bottle.” Finger-press, and Jesus, it feels like it goes right into the previously-unknown core of his being. Milton shudders, head to toe.

“Remember: I have eternity,” whispers that dry, smooth voice. “I can do this forever. But I think that, given the proper incentive, you can make the smart choice. Don't prove me wrong, Milton.” The dark eyes staring up at him hold him whole: the screaming tattoo of Milton's pulse seems to quiet for a moment, subsumed under a calm beat of silence, darkness, cool water. “Don't disappoint me.”

Milton stares down. There's pieces he doesn't understand, things he's missing. Like on the bench. When his brain was too fuzzy and rummed-up to make sense of it. The rum's worn off but--

The Accountant's tongue finds his cock again. His brain turns back off. The hand that's between his legs forces more room for itself and presses and presses and _presses_ and Milton is nothing but raw receptors, nothing but nerves, each one being plucked like an electric guitar's string.

“Which of us do you think has more patience?” the Accountant asks, in between filthy licks, hints of teeth. “Which of us do you think can still be doing this when the sun comes up? Because I can promise you--”

“Please,” he rasps, it slips out before he thinks about it. It slides off his tongue like oil and it cannot be recaptured. The Accountant stops, blinking at him, only the second time he's ever seen him surprised.

“Goddammit, please,” he says, and closes his eyes. “That's what you wanted, right--? So fucking _do_ it--”

There's this to be said for the bastard, he supposes: he keeps his word. That mouth's back on him, swallowing him down, before he can finish his sentence. This time it doesn't stop. Milton's hands scrabble at shoulders and hair, seeking something to hold onto as the assault starts again, and goes, and goes--

From a great distance, he feels a hand grabbing his own, rock steady. Milton holds on. Maybe he isn't running into a wall so much as he is finding the floor, he thinks-- and then he doesn't think anything, because his speedomoter's rising, rising-- it's at the red line-- and then a free fall--

****

He comes back to himself because he hears the click of a gun's safety being disengaged. Milton opens his eyes, blearily, to see the Buick's surrounded. Dark-eyed men with guns leveled, with expressions between anger and contempt.

_“¿Dos maricones blancos?”_ says one, incredulous. “ _No me jodas--”_

“Uh,” Milton says, and shoves at the Accountant's shoulder, “problem--”

The Accountant sits up, lazy, unhurried. Four guns track to him at his motion; he doesn't so much as blink. Milton watches him pull a pocket square from somewhere and dab at his mouth. The men snap warnings and threats in Spanish. Milton decides it's best to pretend ignorance, and raises his hands.

“You assholes must be the biggest idiots on this island,” one of them finally says, in English. “Do you understand _that?”_

“Yes,” Milton says. “Can I, uh, fasten my jeans?”

The English-speaker gives him a curled lip. “Try anything, I shoot you in the head.” Milton nods, and reaches slowly down to tug his underwear and jeans back over himself. ...oh right, they’re broken. He grimaces down as the men laugh. One of them says, “ _Este puta mamapinga..._ ”

“Technically, that would have been me,” the Accountant says off-hand, the first thing he's bothered to say. The guns swivel back to point at him again. Abruptly, Milton is trying not to laugh, because-- goddamn, there's something _hilarious_ about it, about this entire scene: the two of them sitting in this hotwired vintage Buick with its shitty Russian engine, Milton slumped sideways and boneless and post-getting-his-brain-blown behind the driver's seat, and the Accountant in shotgun, prim and proper, surrounded by, what, who are these jokers, gangbangers? Do the cartels operate in Cuba? He has no idea, but they look like they want to be hardasses, anyway, with their gold chains and their open shirts and their guns held wannabe-gangster style.

These guys are so fucked, Milton thinks.

“Are you going to do anything?” he asks out the side of his mouth.

“Me? Why would _I_ do anything?” the Accountant asks, turning to give him arched brows.

“Both of you, shut the fuck up, and get out of the car!” English-speaker yells at them. “You know what the two of you are doing? Dying!”

Neither of them move. Milton rolls his shoulders against the driver's door. “It's too late for that,” he informs English. “Anyway, you're going about this all wrong. If you're going to kill us, don't _tell_ us that.”

“Yes, it removes our incentive to cooperate,” the Accountant chimes in helpfully. “Is this your first time?”

English looks... confused; so do the others, but Milton can't tell if that's a language barrier or what. “Are you two deaf? Get out! Of! The car! I have a  _ gun!” _

“Yes, we can see that,” the Accountant says.

“It's a six-shooter,” Milton adds. “You might want to upgrade.”

English is turning kind of red-purple. He yanks the driver's door open and grabs Milton by the back of his jacket, hauls him backwards. “ _¡Cállate, maricon! ¡Hector, consigue el otro!”_

Milton doesn't fight. He lets it happen, feels the biting twist of the gun jammed against his cheek. The Accountant gets out of the car more languidly, standing at his own pace, as if the other three men didn't have guns trained on him, as if they didn't matter at all. They probably don't.

“Are you gonna do something about it _now?”_ Milton asks.

“Oh, I think you have this in hand.”

“Really? You're gonna punt? You don't buy me a drink, you don't buy me dinner, you take my virtue in a stolen car and now you're not even gonna defend my honor? You're the worst date.”

The Accountant smiles at him over the top of the Buick, resting his forearms on the car's roof. “I kind of enjoy watching you work, John.”

He grins despite everything. Because of everything. The other four men aren't as amused. English jabs him with the gun's muzzle, real macho man, and snarls, “You have no idea whose car you stole, _idiota_. You have no idea _who you're dealing with._ ”

“Yeah, that's true,” Milton agrees, looking not to the man threatening him but instead to the man on the other side of the car, the one watching him, looking pleased, smiling his quiet and satisfied smile, the same smile he wore while surveying the carnage Milton had wrought at Stillwater.

“But honestly? Neither do you,” says Milton, and then he grabs at English's wrist, so then things get loud and angry for a little bit.

And it  _ is  _ just a little bit, because one of the dumbasses tries to shoot the Accountant, which means that by the time Milton's wrested control of the revolver and drilled English between the eyes, the one who shot is already down, and the other two are firing, except the Accountant is no longer standing where he was, so they hit each other. Milton rounds the Skylark's hood in time to watch them hit the dirt simultaneously, gurgling, clutching at their bellies, their chests.

“Thought you said you wanted to see me work.”

“I did. Next time you'll just have to be faster,” the Accountant says. He extends his hand and something small and silver flies to it, out from the wreckage of a man's throat. Milton grimaces a little, despite himself, and looks down at the youngest of the bunch, who's probably not yet twenty, who has a bloom of crimson spreading on his white tank top, who is looking up at Milton with wide eyes and a red and gasping mouth.

“Yeah,” he says distantly. “Next time.”

The Accountant nods. “Yes. Next time. It's time to go, Milton.”

In a way it's reassuring. What happened in the car hasn't changed anything. The wall is still a wall. ( _Or the floor,_ he thinks again. _The floor you find when you're down at rock bottom. The thing that stops you sinking lower.)_ Milton takes a breath, and nods.

“We could take the Skylark,” the Accountant says, watching him.

He looks it over. There's arterial spray on the cream white exterior, now. “She's slow as hell.”

“Are you in any great hurry to get back...?”

He's not. So they take the Skylark. Milton drives, and they roll away from the dead and dying men with the windows down, leaving the smell of blood and gunpowder behind them in favor of the mariposa blossoms, the salt tang of the sea. Milton watches the crumpled bodies dropping away in the rearview.

“Hey-- you.”

“Yes?”

“Were they bad men?”

“ _All_ have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, Milton.”

He grimaces. “Don't give me that shit. You know what I mean. They were...what? MS-13?”

“No, no. Not in Cuba,” the Accountant says with a dismissive wave of one hand from the passenger seat. “The government keeps the Central American gangs from getting a foothold, and, really, there's not enough money here to be worth it to them. MS-13, Calle 18... why would they try to sell cocaine or guns in a place where the average person makes fifty dollars a day? No. These were lesser sinners.”

Milton keeps his eyes on the road. “But still... still bad people. Right?”

“Well, at _least_ as bad as you _,_ ” his passenger says. “Or worse. The street gangs here tend to traffic mostly in prostitution, especially of young boys and youths. Does that ease your suddenly-resuscitated, vestigial conscience, Milton?”

He thinks of the bodies they left lying next to the road, the punk kid he left bleeding out looking up at him. He thinks of other faces too-- the street kids he's been seeing on and off all day, hanging barefoot around the hotels, dark-eyed and watchful with their skinned elbows and the gum packets they're trying to sell to European tourists... Milton smiles, a small and rusty smile. “Yeah, actually.”

The Accountant chuckles, and settles back into the seat. Gets comfortable. It's gonna be a long ride.

The radio works, Milton discovers. The sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club follow them all the way back to Hell.  
  


> “ _Cómo fue,_
> 
> _“_ _ No sé decirte cómo fue, _
> 
> _“_ _ No sé explicarme qué pas…” _


	6. grace

The scene burns into the back of his eyes, again and again and again. Again his daughter dies. Again Jonah King cuts her throat. Again the monster forces her down. Again it happens, again-again-again--

It doesn’t gut him as much as it used to. Knowing Jonah’s dead counts for something.

That’s still not to say it’s a fucking party. Well, he’s gotten out before, and he’ll do it again, he’ll--

\--the feed cuts out. The flames too.

Milton gasps in the sudden darkness, the sudden cool, the sudden absence of pain. He’s still bound: chains dig into his wrists, his body, his limbs--

\--and then they are gone too. Dissolved like mist. Before he can think about picking locks, about twisting free, about anything clever he’s pulled before. He drops like a felled tree.

Hands catch him, beneath the arms. Strong hands. They pull him upright, and his legs are useless, but he’s leaned against something, something. No. Someone. Someone wearing a suit.

“Hey,” he says, except it comes out more like “hnnahhhhhh.”

“Hello, Milton,” says a familiar voice. A steady voice. Another word could be immovable. Steady how an anchor is steady, how bedrock is steady, how a wall is steady. The opposed-piston brakes to his NOS self.

Milton breathes. His face is against crisp fabric. Buttons. A shirtfront, his brain manages to piece together. He can smell laundry soap, and old-school aftershave, and citron. Hell smells like his daughter’s blood and his own skin smoldering. He breathes in these smells-that-aren’t-Hell, these _clean,_ civilized smells, and the hands continue to hold him up.

“Can you walk?” the Accountant asks, and Milton gurgles through a throat wrecked by screaming, _I can try_.

Light bleeds back in, a hallway, endless, institutional grey-green with bleak bulbs overhead. He staggers down it, slumped against the arm that circles him. He doesn’t _need_ the arm. He’s done it himself. Dragged himself down this goddamn hall before. Six times now.

He doesn’t need it, but it does make it easier.

By the time Milton’s brain is closer to functional than not, they are in a car, a car that rides butter-smooth, a car with leather seats in cherry red. He has a good view of them from his position sunk down on the passenger side, his shoulders nearly touching the bench. He remembers this interior-- the dials, the chrome, the details. The Skylark.

“You fixed the engine,” he manages.

“Replaced it with something closer to the original, yes.”

“Good.” He can’t really think beyond the car right now, does not yet know what landscape exists beyond the Skylark’s vintage lines. It could be Hell outside the window, or Chicago, or Monaco for all he knows. “What happened to your Chevy?”

“In the shop. So to speak.”

“Oh,” Milton says, and he zones out another few minutes, or miles, or maybe a thousand of both. He really couldn’t say. Eventually, the world does filter in, one detail registering at a time, like bubbles rising to the surface of a swamp. Wherever they are, it’s warm: not hot, not burning flames, but warm. And humid. And green.

He sits up, drags himself up by the windowsill. The windows are down; he sees oak trees, and Spanish moss, and a blue sky with wisps of shredded white clouds. The world is green: emerald, jade, olive… green. It’s the visual equivalent of the scents from before:  _ living  _ things,  _ real  _ things, a palate cleanser for his eyes and soul. Milton drapes his arm out the window and rests his cheek on his shoulder and watches the verdant world slide past.

Miles go by. Milton does not count. The Accountant does not speak. Milton’s okay with that.

They pass a road sign. Milton gazes at it, his brain slowly resolving the lines into letters, the letters into a word.  _ Shreveport. _

Shreveport. Louisiana. He turns his head, gazes across the seat at the Accountant, who looks relaxed, easy, one hand on the wheel and the other hanging out the window, the wind free with his hair. Smiling the smile of a man out for a Sunday drive (in his mid-life-crisis-restoration-project-car).

“Are you gonna get in trouble for this?” he asks after a minute.

“In trouble?” the Accountant echoes, as if Milton had said something in a foreign language.

“Trouble. You let me out. Pretty sure you’re... not supposed to do that.” Words are slow and stiff, his jaw rusty, his throat still raw.

“I thought your theory was that I’d done it before.”

“There’s a… a difference between enabling it and… you literally hauling me… out of there.”

“Well, Milton, while I’m touched at your concern for my welfare--”

“Oh _hell_ no.”

“\--this actually qualifies as ‘supervised release.’ And it _isn’t_ permanent, so don’t get too excited. This is just a little… a little day trip, let’s say.”

Milton leans his head back against the red leather and lets the wind rush over him. He doesn’t ask where they’re going; he knows that one. Instead he reaches for the radio.

> _“_ _ \--stranded in the combat zone _
> 
> _“_ _ I walked through Bedford Stuy alone _
> 
> _“_ _ Even rode my motorcycle in the rain…” _

It’s not Led Zeppelin, or the Eagles, or AC/DC, but it’ll do. Beneath the music he can hear the engine, can feel it too, through the hand he has on the car door. That beehive rumble. Sounds like the Accountant put a V-8 back in. That’s good. Milton watches Interstate 49 become the One, become an exit, become a boulevard, become a side street. Quiet neighborhood. Some houses, some mobile homes. Cypress trees and pine trees.

> _“_ _ You may be right _
> 
> _“_ _ I may be crazy _
> 
> _“_ _ But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for...” _

There’s a park up ahead. Something. A playground. Milton squints at the colorful plastic tubes and painted metal poles. He takes a breath. And another, and suddenly his pulse is pittering against his ribcage, his palms are sweating--

_ (remember how I found you there _

_ (alone in your electric chair--) _

The Accountant looks sidelong at him. “You aren’t about to do something stupid, are you, Milton?”

He forces himself to scoff instead of swallow. They’re going pretty slow now, he could jump out of the car, he could-- “No. Of course not. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Hummhnnnnn,” says the Accountant, a thoughtful sound. “--are you _nervous?”_

“No,” Milton growls, and surreptitiously wipes his palms on his jeans.

There seems to be a hell of a lot of kids in the park. Then again, Milton supposes he didn’t have much frame of comparison. A long time since he’d been to a park. Since Annie. When she’d been little. When--

There’s a table. Presents. Balloons. Cake. “Fuck,” Milton says. “Is it--”

“Yes, it is.”

“Fuuuck,” Milton says again, and rests his elbow on the car’s windowsill and his forehead in his hand. “What’s the date?”

“Mmm, yes, you wouldn’t know, would you?” says the asshole. Milton closes his eyes. “But then, neither did Piper. Today is the ninth of May. She picked it in lieu of a better day. Perhaps it had some significance to her; I couldn’t say.”

May 9. Okay. He can remember that. Hell will try to burn it out of him, as it’s tried to burn so much else out of him. He’ll bury it down inside his bones,  _ May 9 May 9 May 9,  _ with the other memories he’s locked away, like the first time he saw his wife, and buying his first car, and boosting his first car too. He’ll hold it close.

...Not that he’s sure what he’s gonna  _ do  _ with it. Can’t exactly send her gifts from downstairs. But he’ll remember it. He will. He’ll--

\--he sees Piper first, her blond hair hard to miss, and he follows her line of sight, and here is a child, a girl-- four years old? Five? Brown-haired like her momma (even if Piper’s just as much her momma now, in any way that matters, he supposes), laughing and shrieking and throwing sand at someone, a boy. She looks like Annie and it _hurts,_ oh Jesus it hurts. He grips the car’s door hard enough his hands ache.

“You should have left me burning,” he rasps, watching her.

He can feel the Accountant’s eyes on him, though he doesn’t take his eyes off her. There’s a brief pause, and then that smooth-oiled voice says, “This isn’t intended as punishment.”

“Bull _shit_. What, then?”

“Positive reinforcement.”

Milton snorts, and shifts until his chin is down on his forearm, his forearm draped along the door. His eyes still on his granddaughter. “Stick with sucking me off.”

“Milton…” There’s a hint of warning there, the claws that are always waiting. Milton exhales.

“I can’t _go_ to her, right?”

“No. No, you can’t. I can let you see her, like this; I cannot let you interact with her, talk with her. She can’t see you. Neither can Piper. Neither can Webster. To paraphrase the gospel of Luke: ‘Between us and them, a great chasm has been set in place.’ There _are_ rules.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You fudge the rules whenever _you_ feel like it,” Milton says, and lets his head fall back on the upholstery.

A little pause. “There are some that I can. And there others I must enforce, Milton.”

“Enforce it up your ass,” Milton mutters. With his head back against the seat, he watches: he watches Piper, who looks like she’s thinking of slapping a small child behind that waitress-bright smile she’s wearing-- he wouldn’t blame her, one of the kids running around keeps trying to knock the others to the ground-- he watches Webster, visible always by his height in just about any crowd, Webster with his limp, manning a barbecue grill; and he watches his granddaughter, Annie’s daughter. She’s got a lot of energy, her small legs pumping as she runs, and it looks like she runs everywhere. She’s got on a pink sparkly tee-shirt and corduroy shorts with flowers on them and she is barefoot on the green green grass. He watches her get knocked down by the little asshole kid, spring back up, no tears, she shoves him back…

“That’s right, good girl, punch that little prick, come on, Piper, teach her how to punch,” he grumbles.

The Accountant laughs. “Milton, do you want your granddaughter to learn to solve her problems with violence?”

“If it’s against little shits like that one? Yeah! She should kick his ass!”

“They’re four years old.”

“ _So_? --hey, can I go interact with _him?”_

A throaty snort. “No.”

“C’mon… one minute. Just one minute. Piper and Webster won’t see me,” Milton says, with a smirk across the space of the bench seat.

“Milton, I didn’t carry your whiny ass out of Hell so you could go terrorize a preschooler.”

 _You didn’t ‘carry’ me period, I was walking,_ he feels like retorting. Instead, he laces his hands together behind his head and leans back in the seat, stretching as best he can, and then he reaches for the passenger door.

“John,” says the Accountant, with that note of warning again, a glint of steel beneath his light, easy tone.

“I’m just stretching my legs. Is that okay? That allowed? Is there some passage in Luke saying _thou shalt not walk_?”

They lock eyes for a moment, blue on blue. In the background, someone is mowing their lawn; he hears the chkk-chkk-chkk of the blades, cutting down the green green grass. “Very well. I’ll walk with you.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you will,” Milton says, and rolls his eyes, and opens the car door.

So they walk. It’s a little like Cuba, in a way: the unrelenting greenery around them, the humid warmth, the two of them looking at cars. That said, the cars here aren’t great. Milton cannot get super goddamn enthused about a 2005 Ford Taurus. Even if the Cuban cars had ultimately been a vast and horrible deception, at least they’d _looked_ nice.

There’s exactly one car here worth checking out, and it’s Webster’s. (Or maybe Piper’s, now. Who knows.) Another Camaro, turquoise under a clean springtime sky. Milton sighs a little at the sight of her: spotless, how Webster always kept all his cars. So polished you could use the hood as a shaving mirror. They walk towards it by unspoken agreement, bypassing the Honda Civics and the Toyotas and whatever else.

“Why the hell are you into cars, anyway?”

“Is there some reason I can’t be?”

Milton grimaces. “It’s just-- you’re what, a couple of thousand years old or some bullshit--”

“Oh, _much_ older than that, Milton. Much.”

“\--whatever, the point is, cars have been a thing for, uh, a fraction of a fraction of your existence, it kind of seems like a weird hobby for a-- whatever the hell you are.”

“I can’t like new things? You have such strange assumptions. Anyway--” they’ve reached the Camaro and the Accountant circles it, admiring, trailing his fingers along the Chevy’s clean, strong lines, “--the _idea_ behind cars isn’t new.”

“The ‘idea’?”

“Speed, John. Speed. Ever since man first knew death, he has also tried to outrun it,” the Accountant says, his hands in his pockets now, his suited frame bent at the waist to peer into the car’s interior on the driver’s side. “On foot. On horse. By ship. Faster, faster... Very soon he’ll also be trying to do it via rocketship, I’m sure. Trying to leave Death behind, on planet Earth… Futile, of course. No matter how fast he runs, the scythe is always faster. But it doesn’t stop him trying.”

Milton can  _ hear  _ the Accountant smiling. He is aware he should be using this moment of distraction, when the Accountant is not directly looking at him, but his mouth curls into something sour. “Glad we’re so goddamn  _ amusing." _

The Accountant straightens back up and gazes at him across the Camaro’s roof, brows quirked skyward. “Amusing?”

“Yeah, you know, a real gas, us humans, too stupid to accept our goddamn mortality.”

“Oh, Milton,” the other man says, with a shake of his head. “That’s _not_ it. I find it… hmn... impressive.”

Milton squints at him. “Bullshit.”

“No, no. I do.”

“Yeah, you’ve definitely seemed very impressed when you’ve been punching my kidneys into my spine.”

“Oh but I _am!_ I called you remarkable, remember?” Milton does. Vaguely, but he does. It seems like a long time ago. The Accountant crosses his arms on the roof of the Camaro and regards him with chipper intensity. “You are, in fact, a perfect example of this. No matter how long the odds, how foregone the conclusion, how blatantly obvious it would be to any sane entity that you are going to lose-- no matter that you have in fact _already_ lost, that you’re _dead--_ you just keep driving, Milton. There’s something endearing about your jackass stubbornness.”

“Thank you for that incredibly back-handed compliment,” Milton says, very dry, and adds on, “Creep.”

“You’re welcome. What is it you are so surreptitiously looking for on that side of the Camaro, Milton? A weapon?”

….of course his careful attempts to feel around the wheel-well without it being obvious would have been noticed. Of course. Milton sighs. “No. Webster used to keep a spare key in a magbox.”

“Ah. Well, then, carry on.”

Milton snorts. “Not stopping me?”

“If you’re willing to steal your friend’s car, Milton, that’s on you~~”

Despite himself Milton throws a glance over his shoulder, into the park, half-hunting for a glimpse of Webster. He mutters, “...he’d let me borrow it if I asked. If _you’d_ let me ask.”

“So sure about that? You _did_ wreck the last car he let you take. There’s friendship, and then there’s a ‘71 Chevelle.”

Milton grimaces, and looks again for Webster’s tall figure. There, there he is, talking to Piper, neither of them looking over at the parking lot. Why would they. Why should they. They don’t know he’s here. They can’t. They --

\--did Webster just fucking kiss Piper?

“\--you son of a bitch,” Milton says incredulously, forgetting about the key in order to shade his eyes with his hand and squint through the trees and the jungle gym at the sight of Webster, with Piper leaned against his chest, the two of them with their arms draped around each other.

“Hm?”

“He-- _Jesus_ , Web, you damned dirty old--”

The Accountant circles around the car and leans back against the Camaro, next to Milton, following his gaze. “Oh, now, I think they look very sweet together.”

“They do _not._ He was supposed to take care of her! She’s young enough to be his goddamn daughter!”

“Well, she isn’t. More to the point, she isn’t yours, either. Projecting much, Milton?”

Milton’s answer is to start striding towards the park. A hand grabs the back of his jacket and hauls him, effortlessly, back against the Camaro. Milton slaps at the Accountant’s arm.

“I mean it, Milton: you _cannot_ directly interact with them. Try it again, and we’ll be going _right_ home.”

He scowls. He leans against the car next to the Accountant, his arms crossed, glaring at Webster with his damn barbecue and Piper Hayes. “She’s a  _ kid.” _

“She’s actually thirty. And not precisely a shrinking violet. But you don’t have much call to pass judgment on-- well, _any_ of it, given your own checkered past when it comes to _your_ bedmates, certainly-- anyway, you emotionally blackmailed Piper into raising your granddaughter, and Webster into providing for the both of them, John. You threw them together, and now you’re upset at how it’s working out?”

Milton scowls. “You are a real asshole sometimes, do you know that?”

The Accountant spreads his hands without a word. Milton rolls his eyes. ...and crouches down by the front tire in order to find the goddamn spare key. When he straightens back up with it in hand, the Accountant is just looking at him, that supercilious _Really, Milton?_ look.

“Oh, don’t give me that,” he snaps. “Like _you_ don’t want to see how she rides, too.”

“Hmmn,” says the Accountant, and, when Milton unlocks the passenger door, he gets in.

“Thought so,” Milton says as he circles to the driver’s side. “This makes you my accomplice, you know, technically.”

“ _Oh_ no. I’m just riding along to make sure you don’t go too far.”

“ _Sure_ ,” says Milton, and then he’s turning the key and the engine is kicking over and they both fall silent, listening to that volcanic rumble like some people might listen to an opera.

“Damn,” Milton says after a minute. “He put in an L88.”

“It certainly sounds like it.”

Another little silence. Milton’s eyes sink half shut. He can feel the engine in his bones. He strokes a finger along the steering wheel-- it’s been replaced, smaller, the whole steering box, looks like a 15:1, nice, nice. Not that he’d expect anything less from Webster.

(He just needs Webster to be reliable in one-- more-- thing. But he has to pick his moment, he has to--)

“I could take her around the block,” he says/suggests/dares. “I keep running her in idle here, Webster’s gonna hear the engine at some point.”

The Accountant snorts softly. “Once. Once around the block.”

Milton grins and reaches for the gear shift.

It’s not really properly  _ driving,_, since he can’t go past like twenty miles an hour, but it’s still good. They put the windows down; they cruise the block. Milton throws glances at the park, cautious, partly in case Webster’s coming and partly to steal glimpses of his granddaughter. 

“I don’t even know her name,” he says, the realization of it a sad, small, pathetic kind of thing, like a dead goldfish floating in the tank, the one you’re the first to find on a Monday morning before school and have to decide what to do about before your seven-year-old-daughter discovers it too.

The Accountant regards him from the passenger seat, a long moment, then looks forward again. “Milton, I have a proposition for you.”

Milton throws him a wary look. “...yeah?”

“I trust that you _don’t_ want to go back to the pit.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“Well. I’ve spoken to my boss.” He pauses, like Milton should find that impressive, but, sorry, he doesn’t respect that particular boss any more than any other one he’s ever known, which is to say, not at all. “He is willing to allow me to… try something new.”

“...okay?”

“Yes. As an alternative to being back in that hole you love so much…”

 _If you cram in any more pregnant pauses, someone’s gonna go into labor,_ Milton almost says, but his self-interest is a keen thing, currently piqued. He waits the Accountant out, not giving him anything, not even a glance of curiosity.

“... you could do work for me.”

Well. He looks despite himself, throws a whiskey-tango-foxtrot stare that way. “--work  _ for you?” _

The Accountant is gazing at the road, leaned back in the passenger seat. He spreads one spidery hand, palm up, the smallest of shrugs. “There are benefits.”

Milton continues to stare, or glare. “Benefits? Benefits, what fucking benefits?”

“Well, first among them: _not_ being perpetually immolated. And none of that video feed you find so demoralizing. Watch the road, Milton.”

Milton annoyedly tears his gaze back to the street in time to hit the brakes for a stop sign. “What’s the  _ catch?” _

“The catch? It’d be a _job_. You’d have to do as you were told. Not your strong suit, admittedly.”

He can’t really argue that. Milton rolls his tongue around in his cheek. “With _you_ telling me what to do.”

“Correct.”

“I dunno... my cell is so toasty and cozy. Homey, really. I’m thinking of putting up pictures.”

The Accountant sighs. “You are _such_ an ungrateful little shit, Milton.”

“To thine own self be true. What would I be _doing?_ In this ‘job’.”

“You’d assist in retrieving people who escape.”

“People like me,” Milton says slowly (while he resists the urge to lay on the horn at the minivan in front of him (that features a decal of a stick figure family)).

“Ohhh, I don’t know about that. Most of them really aren’t… like you.”

Milton smirks. “Oh, am I  _ special _ ?”

The Accountant doesn’t respond with a ready insult, with the casual ‘don’t flatter yourself’ that Milton expects. He just observes the middle distance a few seconds before saying, “Pursue the wicked damned. Return them to their decreed punishment. Serve as a hound of Hell. That is the job description. --oh, and you also get a parking spot.”

“Wow. My very own, huh.”

“Your very own.”

“Health insurance?”

“Don’t be silly. You’re dead.”

They’re at a stoplight. Milton drums his fingers against the steering wheel, considering. They’ve done a full circle of the park now; they pass the Skylark, and here’s the Camaro’s spot. Milton pulls in, slowly, dragging it out, because this is almost over, he knows: the sunlight, the grass, the trees, the glimpses of his granddaughter. A few more minutes, only. Unless he takes this offer.

He eases into the parking spot, and puts the Camaro in park. Lets the engine idle.

“Do I have to wear a suit?” he drawls, and the Accountant chuckles, leaning back in the passenger seat, suited arm resting out the rolled-down window, turning his pale face up to the springtime sunlight.

“Oh, I suppose I won’t require it.”

“Big of you.”

“I’m a generous man, Milton.”

“The hell you are,” Milton retorts automatically, but the bitch of it is that the bastard isn’t wrong. Not entirely. Milton is under no illusions that the Accountant _hasn’t_ cut him breaks, even before today. It’s the unavoidable fact that complicates what would otherwise be simple antagonism; the hairpin curve that bends the trajectory of this road they’re travelling. It is not a straight line. The destination is unknown.

“I don’t think you’ll find a better offer,” is all the Accountant says, and yeah, that one’s probably true too. A condemned man doesn’t get a lot of choices. Milton closes his eyes. The leather of the seats is warm beneath his shoulders, the back of his head.

“Well, Milton?”

“What’s her name?”

“Hmmm? Oh. Your granddaughter.” The Accountant’s stark profile angles away as the other man looks back to the trees and the park and, somewhere, his granddaughter. Milton can’t see her, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the Accountant somehow can. “And why do you think you deserve to learn that?”

“Throw me a bone. Sweeten the pot.”

The Accountant snorts. “Ohhh, Milton. It’s never enough for you, is it? Heaven and earth could be moved for you and you’d still want more.”

Milton offers a cock-eyed grin. “Thought you  _ liked  _ the jackass stubbornness. On that note, can we take the Camaro?” The Accountant shakes his head, and tsks in an amiable way, a fond way. He pointedly opens the passenger door and gets out.

(--And that, _that,_ is what he needs-- that moment where those hawk eyes are not watching him--)

Milton’s hand darts down into the gap between the driver’s seat and the door, feeling, touching--  _here. Metal._

“Her name is Grace,” the Accountant says as he shuts the door, turning, turning, back to Milton, once more he is observed. ( _Grace,_ he thinks, and locks it down by _May 9. Grace, Grace, Grace; her name is Grace.)_ “Satisfied?”

“Yeah,” he says, a little hoarse. And he adds on, “Thank you.”

There’s a flicker of approval over that undertaker-lean face: the ghost of a grave smile, a tiny nod. “You’re welcome. So, Milton. Are you taking my offer?”

Milton takes a deep breath of the warm green air, a breath of late spring sunlight and honeysuckle and mown lawns. It might have to hold him for a while, after all. And then he whips up Webster’s Smith & Wesson and fires.

It connects. Point-blank shot, right to the scar.The Accountant’s head snaps back and he drops, soundless, falling between the Camaro and the next car over (a forest green Chevy Tahoe). Milton drops the gun and grabs the gear shift. Slams her into reverse and peels back, twenty feet, into traffic. Shreveport’s suburban drivers lay on their horns and slam on their brakes.

The Accountant is getting up. Milton pops the Camaro over into third gear, jerks the wheel to the right, and stomps the gas pedal to the floor.

Milton sandwiches the Accountant between the Camaro and the Tahoe (and destroys some of the park’s stacked-log fence as well). Metal crunches and screams. The Tahoe’s car alarm starts whooping. Someone starts shouting, probably more than one someone… but Milton’s only looking at the Accountant.

They lock eyes over the Camaro’s half-crumpled hood. Milton grins. The Accountant just looks annoyed, and chiding, as if the fact that he was just T-boned by four thousand pounds of American-made steel and is currently pinned between two vehicles is only an inconvenience. Which it is.

“I’ve thought about your offer, and you know, maybe next time,” Milton says cheerfully.

“ _Milton_.”

“Come on,” says Milton. “Like this way’s not a lot more fun for both of us. Tell you what…”

There’s people coming. Running footsteps. Webster will be among them. And the Accountant is already starting to free himself. Milton gets hurriedly out of the Camaro. “...if you catch me, maybe I’ll reconsider. Maybe with some more positive reinforcement.”

The Accountant gazes at him with enough glinting menace that for one second Milton wonders if maybe he went too far-- but then the other man smiles, white and bright, as the Camaro’s engine hisses steam and radiator fluid around him, as his pale hands prise steel back from his pinned body like a gourmand peeling back a lobster’s shell.

“ _When_ , Milton,” says the Accountant. “Not if.”

“As someone else once said.... I actually look forward to that,” Milton smirks. And then he takes off running for the Skylark.

***

She rides smooth, with her restored V-8. The sky is blue. The world is green. His granddaughter is named Grace, and today is her birthday. And sooner or later, his rearview mirror will show that the pursuit is closing in; sooner or later he will look back and see the Accountant smiling at him. And then they’ll fight.

But not yet. Not now.

For now, he just keeps driving.


End file.
